Saturday, March 22, 2008

THIS JUST IN! RED BULL MAKES HIM MAD!

 
STILL ANGRY FOR HAVING MISSED A ONE TREE HILL MARATHON, SENATOR BAMBI OBAMA CALLED THESE REPORTERS TODAY TO ASK WHY PEOPLE WERE "SO MAD AT ME?"
 
"MY PASTOR, MY SPIRITUAL ADVISOR AND BUDDY SAID AIDS WAS A PLOT TO DESTROY BLACK AMERICA," HE DECLARED.  "WHAT'S WRONG ABOUT THAT?  IT'S A WHITE PERSON'S DISEASE AND THAT'S WHY I DON'T LIKE THE HOMOSEXUALS."
 
WHEN THESE REPORTERS ASKED BAMBI IF HE HAD BEEN DRINKING, BAMBI REPLIED, "A CASE OF YAHOOS AND MAYBE A RED BULL.  BUT REALLY, WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?  YOU THINK AIDS IS A DISEASE?  IT'S NOT.  THAT'S CONSPIRACY TALK.  IT WAS INVENTED.  DAMN THE WHITE HOMOSEXUALS.  DAMN AMERICA.  THERE'S NOTHING CONTROVERSIAL ABOUT THOSE REMARKS.  I THINK PEOPLE NEED TO LIGHTEN UP."
 
WHEN THESE REPORTERS SUGGESTED THAT HE MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER THAT HIS SPEECH ON TUESDAY IGNORED JEREMIAH WRIGHT'S OFFENSIVE STATEMENTS, BAMBI AGREED.
 
"I'M THINKING ABOUT A NEW SPEECH.  IT'LL BE ONE WHERE I TALK ABOUT MY EXPERIENCES AS A BLACK AMERICAN.  I STARTED WRITING IT BUT CAN'T DECIDE WHETHER 'DYNO-MITE' OR 'WHAT YOU TALKING 'BOUT, WILLIS?' IS MORE AUTHENTIC."
 
THESE REPORTERS POINTED OUT THOSE WERE CATCH PHRASES FROM 70S SITCOMS, BAMBI SEEMED SURPRISED THAT IT WAS WRONG TO PASS OTHERS' WORDS OFF AS YOUR OWN.
 
 
 
Starting with war resistance.  Remember James Burmeister?  Probably not.  He was never interviewed on Democracy Now!, he was never profiled in The Nation.  He was one of the war resisters of 2007 who were ignored non-stop by Panhandle Media. (August 24th, Maria Hinojosa interviewed Burmeister for NOW on PBS.)  Ava and my summary:
 
James Burmeister also self-checked out while in Germany. He was lifted out of Iraq and taken there after he was injured. He enlisted to do humanitarian work (e.g. rebuilding in Iraq) and, of course, that didn't end up being the case. ("Of course" is not a judgement of Burmeister's intelligence, it is noting that we are probably far more cynical than he is.) "Humanitarian work" for the US military translated as leaving US military items out in public so that when an Iraqi touched them, he or she could be shot for touching US property. Your tax dollars at work in the illegal war. Following the third bombing he was the victim of, Brumeister was sent to Germany to recover. At that point, he and his family made the decision to go to Canada.
 
Courage to Resist reports that "Burmeister recently returned from Canada and turned himself in to the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky on March 4.  In May 2007, James refused redeployment to Iraq.  He lived in Canada for the last ten months with the help of the War Resisters Support Campaign.  James' father Erich Burmeister of Eugene, Oregon believes that the Army is getting ready to prosecute James.  He is asking people to call the Fort Knox Public Affairs office at 502-624-7451 and let them know you are concerned about PFC James Burmeister."

Meanwhile Duluth's Budgeteer News reports: "War resister Melanie McPherson, an Army reservist from Tofte, will speak at 7 p.m. in UMD's Montague Hall, Room 70" on March 25th next week.  Also speaking next week is Iraq Veterans Against the War's chair Camilo Mejia who, Burlington Free Press reports, "plans to speak at Green Mountain College on at 7 p.m. on March 27 in Ackley Auditorium." 
 
War resisters in Canada were dealt a setback in November  the Canadian Supreme Court refused to hear the appeals of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey. Today, Canada's Parliament remaining the best hope for safe harbor war resisters have, you can make your voice heard by the Canadian parliament which has the ability to pass legislation to grant war resisters the right to remain in Canada. Three e-mails addresses to focus on are: Prime Minister Stephen Harper (pm@pm.gc.ca -- that's pm at gc.ca) who is with the Conservative party and these two Liberals, Stephane Dion (Dion.S@parl.gc.ca -- that's Dion.S at parl.gc.ca) who is the leader of the Liberal Party and Maurizio Bevilacqua (Bevilacqua.M@parl.gc.ca -- that's Bevilacqua.M at parl.gc.ca) who is the Liberal Party's Critic for Citizenship and Immigration. A few more can be found here at War Resisters Support Campaign. For those in the US, Courage to Resist has an online form that's very easy to use. That is the sort of thing that should receive attention but instead it's ignored. We will note war resisters in Canada tomorrow.  There is not time today, my apologies.          

There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Matt Mishler, Josh Randall, Robby Keller, Justiniano Rodrigues, Chuck Wiley, James Stepp, Rodney Watson, Michael Espinal, Matthew Lowell, Derek Hess, Diedra Cobb, Brad McCall, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Peter Brown, Bethany "Skylar" James, Zamesha Dominique, Chrisopther Scott Magaoay, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Clara Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Blake LeMoine, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Logan Laituri, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Wilfredo Torres, Michael Sudbury, Ghanim Khalil, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, at least fifty US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum. 

Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters. In addition, VETWOW is an organization that assists those suffering from MST (Military Sexual Trauma).    
 
Like most things Iraq related, Iraq Veterans Against the War's Winter Soldier Investigation is not receiving the attention it deserves.  Noting the media silences on Iraq and actually writing about Winter Soldier, Osagie Ighile (North Carolina's Duke Chronicle) observes:

 
In the three days of testimony by war veterans, one thing that has emerged is that Abu Ghraib and other atrocities are not exceptions, but are commonplace.  The main cause is not an innate wickedness in our troops but is rather the necessary outcome of placing them in a situation where friend and foe are indistinguishable and soldiers are forced to choose between their survival instinct and their moral code.        
Marine Corps Sgt. Adam Kokesh, who served in Falluja from February to September 2004 on a civil affairs team, specifically explained this confusion of the rules of engagement, which state that 'positive identification is required prior to engagement' where positive identification means "'reasonable certainty' that you target is a legitimate military target." However, Kokesh said when all soldiers see is a muzzle flash from a building in a civilian area, they are forced to choose between increasing their chance of survival by returning fire and not breaking the rules of engagement.  Consequently, he stated that "we changed the rules of engagement more often that we changed our underwear." 
 
Trina wrote about Kokesh's testimony on Friday's Rules of Engagment morning panel and she noted him explaining,  "During the seige of Falluja, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At first it was, you follow the rules of engagement you do what you're supposed to do and then there were times when you could shoot any suspicious observers or someone with binoculars or someone with a cell phone was fair game. And that really opened things up to a lot of subjectivity. But also firing at muzzle flashes into the city. Firing Mark 19s became common practice. At one point we imposed a curfer on the city of Falluja and at that point we were told we could shoot anything after dark."  Which goes back to Jason Hurd's testimony on the same panel about how civilians were supposed to recognize a checkpoint easily but, as Hurd noted, "I was in front of a desert colored vehicle, preceeding a desert colored building in desert colored camoflauge."
 
James Gilligan testified about both Afghanistan and Iraq.  Our focus is Iraq but his testimony on Afghanistan was very powerful for any who want to pursue it. 
 
James Gilligan: 2003, Iraq.  My HNS Company first sergeant.  He had a thing for handing out candy to the children who would come up to our Humvees -- winning the hearts and minds.  My first sergeant had seen that there was a little girl next to the Humvee and he personally handed her a lollypop. The little girl, excited, ran away from the vehicle and we're guessing her brother or a neighborhood kid came up behind her and hit her.  My first sergeant then proceeded to get out of the vehicle in the crowded marketplace endangering our entire convoy, withdrew his M9 pistol and ran after the kid, picked the kid up approximately 30 feet away from our vehicle and hoisted him one foot in the air, threatening him with the M9 pistol.  In 2003, in Iraq, we were ordered to . . . secure an expeditionary runway.  It was my job to pull overwatch security. . . .  In 2003, while securing this expeditionary runway we had observed that there was a gentleman at the end of the runway collecting souveniers.  I was my job as a corporal to go down and investigate and, of course, push this guy away and inform him that he was not to be at the end of our runway collecting souveneirs.  I took Lance Cprl. Jermone with me and we had went all the way down to the runway on foot, it's approximately 200 meters.  After walking down there, the gentleman was collecting bits of rounds  set from a previous battle. I radioed over what we were doing and of course we searched him and took away any kind of munitions that we had found I was then ordered to search the vehicle.  As I told Lance Cpl. Jerome "Secure my detainee," I went ahead and I searched the vehicle.  Afterwhich, I reported back that I did not find anything futher other than what was on the ground and we had already taken away from the gentleman, I was informed to make the vehicle inoperable.  It is at this time that I pulled out my knife.  I opened up the seats, I cut every single wire that I could find, I slashed tires and I made sure that his vehicle could not be used again without even thinking that this could be this man's lifeblood.   
 
He spoke last Friday, on the second Rules of Engagement panel.  Antonia Juhasz was among the speakers on the corruption and contractors panel that took place immediately before the second Rules of Engagement panel.  Among the tiny attention that's been doled out, this hearing has had almost no attention.  (There's one that got even less attention.)  So we're going to note her comments at length (and Wally and Cedric noted her last week).
  
Antonia Juhasz: The problem is that when these grants were given, first of all, Iraqis were of course overlooked.  But not only were Iraqis overlooked, the entire structure of the economic
reconstruction laid in place the results we're seeing now.  So one of the first acts of the US occupation government led by Paul Bremer was called the de-Baathification order.  This was the order by which Bremer fired 120,000 of all of the key ministerial leaders in Iraq, all of the engineers, all of the scientists, all of the people who ran the water ministry, the electrical ministry, the oil ministry.  He fired them all.  120,000 people.  He fired them all because he didn't want anyone standing in the way of the restructing that was being planned.  That left an enormous brain vaccum.  The next step that Bremer did was to fire 500,00 Iraqi soldiers. . . . Half a million Iraqi soldiers.  The US military had intended that those soldiers would be put to work to do the reconstruction but the Bush administration's economic plan didn't include that.  The Bush administration's economic plan was to bring in private contractors.  So immediatly at the get-go you had half-a-million men with guns made unemployed, without jobs, without money and their families left without hope, without money.  And some estimates put that number at 2.5 million Iraqis -- ten percent of the population -- who from the get-go were now very, very hostile to the reconstruction and to the invasion, and to the occupation.  All of these people also knew that US companies were being given billions of dollars to reconstruct the country and you'll hear many people testify to the fact that there were many Iraqis who while they were upset that Iraqis companies -- of which there were many, Iraqi workers -- of which there were many, who were more than  capable of doing the work, were being jumped over.  But there was a sense that, "If America was going to spend 10 billion dollars fixing our electricity, that's no so bad and, you know, maybe that'll be good."  And there was a sense of allowing this to take place.  The reconstruction failed and one of the primary reasons that it failed was that objective was not to just get the services up and running.  The objective was this longer term permanent presence which I mentioned. 
So that you had companies like Bechtel spending the first six weeks in country . . . walking around doing an assessment of the situation.  They could have talked to the Iraqis who ran the water systems.  They could have hired the Iraqis to run the water systems.  But they didn't.  They walked around, they checked out the scene.  In that time there was no electricty, there was no water being provided and that built up, of course, bad will and by the time Bechtel got to work it became very unsafe for Bechtel to be at work.  The failure of the reconstruction continues but one of the things that's important for us to remain aware of today is that many of the companies have radically failed.  So Bechtel, a recent report found that they completed less than half of the projects that they were contracted to fulfill and that was water, electricity, schools, basic  rebuilding.  Parsons, another analysis just done that Parsons had barely fulfilled any of its comittments.  Of the statistics that Louis just gave, Parsons was hired to rebuild 150 primary health centers across the country.  They built 34 and not all of them are even functional.  But not all of that money has been paid out and that's an area where we can take action.  I just don't have nearly the time to say the things I'd planned to say so let me just say a couple of things.  The first is, the intention of the war to be about oil.  Right now we are in a situation where five oil companies -- Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and Total, have just signed, within the last week, contracts to get oil  -- to go into Iraq. Anyone with any sense of Iraqi history recognizes the names of these companies.  These are the exact same companies that from the end of WWII until 1970 owned all of Iraq's oil.  They were given it as a war bounty at the end of WWI.   They owned it, they controlled it and they controlled Iraq's fate because of owning the oil. Since they were kicked out in the early 1970s, they've been trying to get back in.  This is the second or third and maybe the largest pot of oil in the world depending on who's counting.  The world is running out of oil; however, oil sells for $110 a barrel.  This oil is sitting there like a gleaming prize at the end of the finish line.  And believe me, they have been planning and plotting to get it.  These five contracts are the tip of the iceberg.  The intent is to get the Iraqis to pass a law that would put everything back the way it was in the '20s, to take it from a nationalized oil system to a privatized oil system where US oil companies -- and a little bit for the French and a little bit for the British because, you know, we like them -- would own and control the oil.  Now, if that happens a US government report that was leaked by ABC News said -- and just so we are using the terminolgoy, this is one of the president's benchmarks  for Iraq, which the Congress adopted, passage of an oil law in Iraq.  Another one of the benchmarks, by the way, was reversing the de-Baathification law that Bremer put into place that fired all of those experts.  The oil law, if it is to be put into place and if US companies that are angling are Exxon, Cheveron, Conoco, Marthon, BP, Shell and Total.  If they stay, they will need to be quote "underwritten by the US government."  I take "underwritten by the US government" to mean you, to be underwritten by the US military.  That we will have to stay to ensure their safety and the continuation of their mission which was the whole reason we went there in the first place. 
 
On contractors, at the start of the week Hannah Allem (McClatchy Newspapers) reported on the opinions expressed by Iraq's clerics that "the real crime is that five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they still swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter because of a lack of electricity.  Government rations are inevitably late, incomplete or expired.  Garbage piles up for days, sometimes weeks, emanaging toxic fumes" and Allam noted that now worms are being found in the water.
 
Staying with the topic of contractors, Sahara Zahav (Florida Alligator) notes Iraq veteran Anthony Maroun's speaking to students at Santa Fe Community College prior to Winter Soldier:
 
As the team leader of his unit, it was part of Maroun's job to keep the Dell computers they used from overheating in the desert climate.  But as hard as he tried, Maroun couldn't manage to get the necessary air conditioner, which meant his unit couldn't do its mission.  
"I finally asked a friend of mine, this contractor, to help me out," Maroun said.  "He got the air conditioner so fast.  But me, a leader in the Marines, wasn't connected enough to get the equipment we needed." 
Maroun said for him, that air conditioner stood for the "corporate takeover of a country."
 
We'll be noting Winter Soldier in Monday's snapshot.  Visitors have e-mailed to complain that this or that person hasn't been noted.  Regarding civilians offering testimony, Nancy Lessin of Military Families Speak Out is someone that will be hopefull noted on Monday.  Otherwise?  None of us are interested in highlighting someone who says -- to wide applause -- that there's no difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the illegal war and then rushes off to give an embarrassing interview where he maintains there is a difference and, since he can peer into the souls of both, he knows Barack is all things wonderful.  So if he says, to applause at Winter Soldier, that the candidates need to be pressed and now is the time and he then rushes off to give an interview where he completely dismisses Hillary's signing onto US Senator Bernie Sanders' call to ban Blackwater (while offering the valentine of an excuse for Bambi that it's "complicated"), we're not interested.  We're not interested in liars.  We're not interested in people who went to Winter Soldier to get some applause and some attention and then turned around and gave interviews taking back their applause lines.    Six snapshots have covered Winter Soldier and Monday we'll probably wind things down.  We don't have time to note hypocrites so those visitors needing their 'man' noted can just forget it.  He danced pretty at Winter Soldier and then -- like his earlier interview subject Samantha Power -- said something completely different.  We're not interested.  We could further add that while others had to stick to a time limit, the visitors' 'man' was allowed to run on and on, always promising to wrap up but avoiding that repeatedly.  If you missed Winter Soldier you can stream online at Iraq Veterans Against the War, at War Comes Home, at KPFK, at the Pacifica Radio homepage and at KPFA, here for Friday, here for Saturday, here for Sunday. Aimee Allison (co-host of the station's The Morning Show and co-author with David Solnit of Army Of None) and Aaron Glantz were the anchors for Pacifica's live coverage. 
 
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