Source. / Onion News Network
Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / Posted July 7, 2008
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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MEDIA : Reading The Onion Seriously
Combining irreverent humor and acerbic critique, a handful of new media outlets — including The Onion — are transforming American politics and culture, writes Theodoe Hamm, in his new book The New Blue Media.
By Theodore Hamm
After 9/11, The Onion stopped its presses for one week. The hiatus allowed the paper to show its respect for the gravity of what had happened in lower Manhattan. But it also enabled its staff to come up with the paper’s quite poignant reaction to the terrorist strikes. It was announced by a large banner headline that read, “Holy Fucking Shit — Attack on America.” The statement perfectly captured the confusion and fear of the moment. The paper’s lead story, “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” accurately recorded the Bush administration’s immediate and enduring response to 9/11. To “America’s enemy, be it Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, a multinational coalition of terrorist organizations, any of a rogue’s gallery of violent Islamic fringe groups, or an entirely different, non-Islamic aggressor we’ve never even heard of,” Bush vowed, “be warned.” A pair of news briefs in that same issue reported, “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Hijackers Find Themselves in Hell” instead of the “Paradise” they had expected.
As its new home city (the paper moved its headquarters from Madison to New York City months earlier) and the nation tried to make sense of the attacks, The Onion’s 9/11 issue uniquely encompassed a wide range of popular sentiments. “We really were just trying to capture the sadness and anger everyone was feeling, and somehow it came out as humor,” Robert Siegel, then The Onion’s editor-in-chief, recalled a year later.
The End of Satire?
Ironically, perhaps, the most powerful statement The Onion made in that landmark issue was not about terrorism or the likelihood of the Bush administration’s overreaction to it, but instead about the future of irony itself. That week in Time, Roger Rosenblatt’s column carried the ominous title “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” with an equally foreboding subheading of “No Longer Will We Fail to Take Things Seriously.” As Ground Zero smoldered, Rosenblatt searched for both blame and a sign of hope. He wrote, “For some 30 years — roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright — the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” It was irony, Rosenblatt suggested, that somehow had blinded us to the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism.
Such an overwrought notion was blown apart by a range of critics, comic and otherwise. For its part, an Onion news brief announced, “Report: Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete.” In the item, a Gen X-er states, “Remember the day after the attack, when all the senators were singing ‘God Bless America,’ arm-in-arm?’ asked Dave Holt, 29.’Normally, I’d make some sarcastic wisecrack about something like that. But this time, I was deeply moved.’ Added Holt: ‘This earnestness can’t last forever. Can it?'”
Both the news brief and the entire 9/11 issue vividly illustrated The Onion’s answer to Holt’s question, as did its lead story in the next issue, “Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.” Looking back one year later, Siegel explained to Alternet’s Daniel Kurtzman that irony would survive well into the twenty-first century. “Many things about America changed, but you can’t kill humor….Obviously people are going to laugh and people will still be sarcastic and snide and ironic and winking and insincere. That’s a good thing. That’s a sign of the return to normalcy.”
‘Gulf War II: The Vengeance’
Unfortunately, for the Bush administration “normalcy” soon meant outright deception, scare tactics, and bullying in the service of its primary goal of invading Iraq. The Onion, as usual, saw right through the jingo. In March 2002, when talk of taking down Saddam was in the air but nearly six months away from becoming an official plan, one of the paper’s headlines read, “Military Promises ‘Huge Numbers’ for Gulf War II: The Vengeance.” The lead photo for the article showed Donald Rumsfeld giving a typical chesty gesture at a press conference in front of a Photoshopped movie poster of Gulf War II: The Vengeance, starring W. and Saddam. The other photo in the piece was even more prophetic, as it featured W. in full military gear, carrying an automatic weapon and hunting down rebel forces. The image smacked more of Rambo than the Top Gun–style “Mission Accomplished” scene that W. eventually chose, but the prediction was accurate enough.
According to the article, the PR blitz for Gulf War II also included a pact with Topps for a series of trading cards; “a first-look deal with CNN, guaranteeing the network full access to the front lines, as well as first crack at interviewing the men and women behind the scenes”; and a “two-cry deal” with Dan Rather. Late that summer, then–White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously stated that the administration was waiting until after Labor Day to unveil its full plan for Iraq because “you don’t introduce a new product in August.” Six months prior, The Onion had already sketched out the marketing plan for that dangerous “new product.”
As the White House made its sales pitch for war, the lead article in The Onion’s issue in the second week after Labor Day — dated September 11, 2002 — declared, “Bush Won’t Stop Asking Cheney If We Can Invade Yet.” In this case, the story worked a father-versus-impatient-son storyline, and so focused less on details of the Iraq question than on Cheney’s control over W. At one point, however, the piece did report that “Cheney sat Bush down and explained at length the political ramifications of proceeding with a first strike without creating the appearance of approval from Congress and the American people.” It continued by quoting Cheney’s advice to Bush: “If we just wait a little longer, Saddam is bound to commit some act of aggression or we’ll find some juicy al Qaeda ties or something, and then we can make it look like the whole country’s behind it.”
Here again the satire was right on target. Over the next month, in order to help force Congress into granting the administration the authority to go to war — a vote that would haunt many leading Democrats through both 2004 and 2008 — both Cheney and Bush stressed Saddam’s alleged ties to al Qaeda. Such outright distortions helped propel the Republicans’ success in the upcoming midterms as well as in 2004, and their game plan almost seemed lifted directly from the pages of a satirical publication. While serious liberal news organizations such as the New York Times helped disseminate the White House’s specious rationale for war, The Onion’s lampoons turned out to be far more accurate. The Bush gang, the paper said, was hell-bent on invading Iraq, and it would deploy any means necessary in order to do so.
Throughout the fall campaign, The Onion continued to see right through Bush’s bluster. For example, the paper’s lead story in early October announced that “Bush Seeks U.N. Support for ‘U.S. Does Whatever It Wants Plan.'” “As a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, America has inspired the world,” Bush told the UN General Assembly. “In this spirit, I call upon the world’s nations to support my proposal to give America unrestricted carte blanche to remove whatever leaders, plunder whatever resources, and impose whatever policies it deems necessary or expedient.” Such aggressive unilateralism underpinned the rationale W. here gave the UN for overthrowing Saddam: “The time has come for this man to step down, because we want him to.” Meanwhile, the question “What should we do about Saddam’s WMD?” domi-nated mainstream media discussion. Based on a false premise, the question itself dictated the answer. It was a sophisticated level of deception, and given Saddam’s reputation, it was easy fodder for cable news chatter.
But for its part, The Onion generally steered clear of that question, and instead frequently pointed out how the war enabled Bush to shift the nation’s attention from other problems. In “Bush on Economy: ‘Saddam Must Be Overthrown,'” for example, the war solved problems ranging from a weak manufacturing sector to the ongoing corporate scandals, which at the time involved WorldCom and Enron. Similarly, W.’s answer to the problem of North Korea was, of course, to invade Iraq; later, he tried to help sell his tax cuts by offering another $300 on top of his initial tax rebate, provided that the United States went to war. Brushing aside the WMD issue, The Onion consistently put forth a satirical but convincing case that the United States was going to war simply because the Bush administration wanted it.
When the war finally began in March 2003, the paper continued to mock both the Bush administration’s theatrics and its claims to an easy victory. One memorable lead story again foretold Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment with remarkable accuracy. Beside a photo of W. leading an invading squad of soldiers through desert combat, the paper’s top story explained how “Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry into Battle.” In that same issue, a news brief reported,”Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy,” which in just six words refuted most arguments for the war. With notable foresight, the lead in the following week’s top story then stated,”Following a 12th consecutive day of fighting, a puzzled and frustrated President Bush confided to military advisors Monday that he ‘really figured the war would be over by now.'”
In that story, and in many others, Bush came across as juvenile and incompetent, a front man for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other neo-cons. In the fall of 2002, Beltway media mainstay Bob Woodward had, in Bush at War, legitimized the notion that W. really was in charge of his administration’s war plans; four years and two books later,Woodward’s analysis mirrored that found in The Onion.
The Onion Stays the Course
As the overthrow of Saddam became the occupation of Iraq, the paper stayed on the attack. It fired back at Bush shortly after he gave his spurious speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring victory; here was the Hollywood moment that the paper had sagely predicted, with Bush effectively combining two Tom Cruise films (Top Gun and Mission: Impossible).
But in The Onion’s account, instead of stating that the mission was over, the sign behind Bush read “screw you, vets,”and the story detailed a ribbon-cutting ceremony at which Bush cut veterans benefits. The piece also featured what was by The Onion standards an unusually earnest photo, of a homeless African American vet dejectedly panhandling. Such sentimentality was short-lived, however, as the next week’s lead story returned to form: “Gen. Tommy Franks Quits Army to Pursue Solo Bombing Projects.” “The years I’ve spent with the Army have been amazing, and we did some fantastic bombing,” Franks stated. “But at this point, I feel like I’ve taken it as far as I can. It’s time for me to move on and see what I can destroy on my own.”
Amid the chaotic aftermath of the invasion, many media observers, as well as Democratic Party officials, began to turn against the Bush administration, attacking its incompetent handling of the occupation. The Onion, however, continued its relentless assault on both the design and the execution of the war.
© 2008 by Theodore Hamm.
This piece was adapted from Theodore Hamm’s The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics (The New Press). Published with the permission of The New Press and available now at good book stores everywhere.
Theodore Hamm is the founding editor of the Brooklyn Rail and an associate professor of urban studies at Metropolitan College of New York. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Truthdig, among other publications.
Source. / In These Times / Posted June 26, 2008
The New Blue Media at Amazon.com.
The Rag Blog
Surge Amnesia : The Media’s Newest Affliction
They’re swallowing this nonsense whole
By Arianna Huffington / July 7, 2008
John McCain, aided and abetted by his loving protectors in the media, is running a victory lap on Iraq. To hear them tell it, the surge has “worked” — indeed, it has been a huge success — and this, like a last second Hail Mary pass, has vindicated the entire disastrous Iraq misadventure.
Buoyed by a reduction in violence in Iraq, war supporters are crawling out from the shadows and beating their chests.
“I am proud of the decision of this administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Condi Rice told Judy Woodruff last week. This echoed the comments of her boss, who crowed at a GOP awards dinner at the end of June: “The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision at the time, and it is the right decision today.” Bush even felt emboldened to dust off blast from the past and claim: “Democracy is taking root where a tyrant once ruled.”
And the media — and even a number of Democrats — are swallowing this triumphalist nonsense whole, and washing it down with a pitcher of revisionist Kool-Aid. The result: a collective case of political amnesia. Everyone seems more than happy to forget what the president’s own stated goal for the surge was: to create “the breathing space [the Iraqi government] needs to make progress in other critical areas.”
But here we are, 18 months later, and McCain and the GOP are being allowed to change the goal. And, surprise, surprise, the retroactive goal they’ve chosen is remarkably similar to the current situation in Iraq: violence is down while the “progress in other critical areas” is sorely lagging.
So, even though Bush originally claimed that “a successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations,” the surge is now being judged exclusively on the success of “military operations.” And since that’s what the surge is all about, the surge is working. And since the surge is working, maybe we need to rethink this whole idea of ending the war, right?
Using Bush-McCain logic, since the surge has succeeded in reducing violence, there is no need for us to leave. Indeed, we can stay forever.
But here’s the thing: while McCain and the Republicans may have been able to win the PR war among the American media, there is still that nagging problem of the lack of reconciliation among the warring factions in Iraq.
Last month’s GAO report offered chapter and verse on all the ways the Iraqis have failed to reach the benchmarks that were the actual goals of the surge (see HuffPoster Mitchell Bard’s comprehensive breakdown of the report).
And a ceremony held in Baghdad this weekend spoke volumes about the actual state of affairs in Iraq. The event, organized by an expert in conflict resolution, was held to announce the signing of a non-binding agreement reached by representatives from a wide range of Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic factions, and hammered out during a series of secret meetings in Helsinki over the last year.
Although Iraq’s Minister of Reconciliation said the agreement “has the potential to bring Iraqi political parties together in common cause in a way no endeavor has,” coverage of the event leaves a distinctly different impression.
According to the New York Times, there were complaints that representatives of the Maliki government “seemed more intent on declaring the talks a success than in continuing to discuss significant disagreements.” “When we came here,” said a secular Sunni politician quoted in the Times,” Maliki refused to talk about anything, just to have a meeting and a celebration.”
“They can hug each other, and kiss each other, but they still don’t agree,” Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group told the Boston Globe.
“You still have a dominant Shiite power structure that doesn’t want to cede any power,” said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service. “Then you have Sunnis who are committed to overturn their humiliations. The fundamental dynamics have not changed.”
The Globe suggested the most important aspect of the agreement was the fact that it was “announced at the Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, marking the first time that participants in the effort have felt safe enough to gather inside their own country,” then pointed out that the level of security required to attend the ceremony — “including walls around segregated neighborhoods and eight checkpoints to enter the Green Zone” — serves as “a grim reminder of how far Iraq has to go.”
No surprise then that, according to the Times, experts think real reconciliation in Iraq could take decades.
And this is the good news out of Iraq.
As we continue on the long, hard slog until Election Day, John McCain and his supporters are going to claim again and again that the surge has worked. And it looks like the media are going to let that patently false assertion go unchecked. Which is pretty much how the war got started in the first place. So it is up to Obama, the Democrats, and all of us, to insist on holding the advocates of the surge to its original goal.
And while we are at it, we should also hold them to the original justification for the war itself.
Despite the revisionist re-writes, we didn’t go to war because we were committed to demonstrating that America could unleash violence in Iraq and then, five years later, curb it through the use of reinforcements. We went to war because we were told Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to our national security and, secondarily, as a means of fomenting democracy throughout the Middle East.
Of course, the “imminent threat” turned out to be non-existent, and our presence in Iraq has strengthened the hand of every bad actor in the region: al Qaeda is safe and adding recruits, Hamas has come to power in Palestine, Hezbollah has reasserted itself in Lebanon, and Iran has become the strongest player in Iraq. Meanwhile, the reduction in casualties in Iraq is starting to be offset by increased casualties in Afghanistan — once again showing the fatal ignorance of stealing from Peter to stop-loss Paul and keep him in Iraq.
So, tell me again: how is the surge working?
Source. / The Huffington Post
The Rag Blog
Drawn and Quartered
The Rag Blog / Posted July 7, 2008
New War Brewing?
Before the election, the Bush regime will very likely attack Iran.
Despite the official justifications, the primary motivation will be to derail an impending Obama victory. The attack creates a trap for Obama. If he opposes it, he will be painted as a pacifist wimp unfit to be commander-in-chief. If he goes along, he loses much of his antiwar base. Obama must get out front with vocal opposition so as to preemptively forestall this attack. One way to do that would be to threaten Bush with impeachment if he attacks without further consultation with Congress.However, Congress is even now being asked to approve a naval blockade of Iran, which is in itself an act of war.
Meanwhile, all antiwar activists must be making contingency plans so that any attack is met with massive nationwide civil disobedience.
Ideally, the threat of such a response would be a factor in preventing its happening.
David Hamilton / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2008
U.S., Israel take dangerous steps
By Eric Margolis / July 6, 2008
GENEVA — The U.S., Israel and Iran are playing a very dangerous game of chicken that soon could result in a new Mideast war.
U.S. intelligence has concluded that Iran is not working on nuclear weapons. But the Bush administration and Israel, recently joined by France, are issuing increasingly loud threats of military action to frighten Iran into halting its nuclear enrichment program.
Iran insists its nuclear program is entirely for civilian use. Tehran is alternating between conciliatory statements and threats to retaliate against any attack by inflicting economic chaos on the global economy. Europe fears the economic damage a war against Iran would bring far more than Iran’s nuclear program.
Senior Israeli officials are openly threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear installations before President George W. Bush’s term expires. Early, this month Israel staged a large, U.S.-approved exercise using F-15s and F-16s to rehearse an attack over 900 miles – precisely the distance to Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran’s government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel’s destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran.
This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end.
Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets.
Senior American officers Admiral William Fallon and Air Force Chief Michael Mosley recently were fired for opposing war against Iran. According to Israel’s media, President Bush even told Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he could not trust America’s intelligence community and preferred to rely on Israeli intelligence.
Air Blitz
Intensifying activity is evident at U.S. bases in Europe and the Gulf, aimed at preparing a massive air blitz that may include repeated attacks on 3,100 targets in Iran. Other sources say Iranian Revolutionary Guard installations will be barraged by cruise missiles.
In Washington, Congress, under intense pressure from the Israel lobby, is about to adopt a resolution calling for a naval blockade of Iran, an overt act of war.
Pro-Israel groups have been airing TV commercials claiming Iran is attacking American troops in Iraq and threatens the U.S.
The Bush administration’s last desperate act, its Gotterdammerung, could be war with Iran. UN weapons inspectors concur with U.S. intelligence that there is no proof Iran is working on nuclear arms, but the neocon war party in Washington is determined to loosen a final Parthian shaft by striking Iran.
Israel asserts the right to maintain its Mideast nuclear monopoly by destroying all fissile-producing reactors in the region. Iran vows to retaliate against Israel with its inaccurate Shahab missiles, shut the Strait of Hormuz and mine the Gulf, producing worldwide financial panic, severe fuel shortages, and $400-$500 per barrel oil. Iran likely will attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait, and strike Saudi and Kuwaiti oil facilities. Canadians in Afghanistan could also become targets.
Grave Damage
The embattled Bush administration’s bunker mentality is leading to war that will gravely damage long-term U.S. Mideast interests. A single Iranian missile hit on Israel’s reactor would do more damage to the Jewish state than all its previous wars. Besides, Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. A U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran will guarantee Tehran decides to build nuclear weapons.
Israel and Iran have turned their regional rivalry into a confrontation that threatens all.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, not its bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls that nation’s military and insists Iran will not produce nuclear weapons. Israel claims it faces a second holocaust. Iran says Israel’s nuclear forces threaten its existence.
The dogs of war are being unleashed.
Source. / Toronto Sun
I’m never one to belittle the danger of war, especially with the current crew in the White House.
But I’m still for taking all these dire warnings with a grain of salt, as largely a war of nerves and misinformation, which, however, is also dangerous in it’s own right.
I could be wrong, but let’s hope I’m not. Let’s oppose the danger of wider war without assuming it’s a done deal.
Why? Because while it’s fairly easy to bomb Iran, I’ve yet to hear anything even approaching reasoned analysis, from any military or security experts (not NeoCon pundits), as to what one does on the day after an attack, and the day after that, and so on.
Even with the problems of theocracy, Iran is a tough adversary with a large number of very important allies across the globe, not to mention 300 million Shia among 1.2 Muslims globally, and a Shia-dominated government in Iraq.
I think that’s why we hear reports of various Pentagon, State and CIA people nixing these ploys behind the scenes.
Goodness knows, I’d rather not have to rely on THEM, so let’s organize and empower ourselves, but without the Apocalypse, which sometimes has the opposite effect, of making people feel helpless and passive.
Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog
The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Bush Administration, Iran, Iran War, Obama, Presidential Campaign
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Oops! Christian Site’s Homophobia Leads to Big Faux Pas
Calls Olympian Tyson Gay ‘Homosexual’
The American Family Association obviously didn’t foresee the problems that might arise with its strict policy to always replace the word “gay” with “homosexual” on the Web site of its Christian news outlet, OneNewsNow. The group’s automated system for changing the forbidden word wound up publishing a story about a world-class sprinter named “Tyson Homosexual” who qualified this week for the Beijing Olympics.
Tyson Gay won the men’s 100 meters final in June at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. The problem: Tyson’s real last name is Gay. Therefore, OneNewsNow’s reliable software changed the Associated Press story about Tyson Gay’s amazing Olympic qualifying trial to read this way:
“Tyson Homosexual was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has. His time of 9.68 seconds at the U.S. Olympic trials Sunday doesn’t count as a world record, because it was run with the help of a too-strong tailwind. Here’s what does matter: Homosexual qualified for his first Summer Games team and served notice he’s certainly someone to watch in Beijing. “It means a lot to me,” the 25-year-old Homosexual said. “I’m glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me.”
Source. / Fox Sports / July 3, 2008
And from the Slueth:
Contacted by the Sleuth for comment on the software mishap, American Family Association spokeswoman Cindy Roberts in Tupelo, Miss., told us, “I think it was just a fluke.”
Fred Jackson, news director of OneNewsNow, tells the Sleuth his organization has now fixed the software glitch. “We took the filter out for that word,” he said, without uttering the “G” word.
“We don’t object to the word ‘gay,'” Jackson explained, except “when it refers to people who practice a homosexual lifestyle.” And the “G” word, he says, has “been co-opted by a particular group of people.” (People who are g-a-y.)
The OneNewsNow story about Gay, which was spotted by blogger Ed Brayton at scienceblogs.com, as well as by gay blogs, including PageOneQ, even included these nice details about Mr. Homosexual’s qualifying sprint:
Wearing a royal blue uniform with red and white diagonal stripes across the front, along with matching shoes, all in a tribute to 1936 Olympic star Jesse Owens, Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark. This time, he kept pumping those legs all the way through the finish line, extending his lead. In Saturday’s opening heat, Homosexual pulled way up, way too soon, and nearly was caught by the field, before accelerating again and lunging in for fourth place.
Source. / Mary Ann Akers / washingtonpost.com / July 1, 2008
Other items we’d like to see on the offending web site:
Enola Homosexual Drops A-Bomb on Japan!
Typhoon Homosexual Causes Devastation
Priest and writer Jean Pierre Homosexual Is Descendant of Lord John Peter Homosexual
Memorial Day Service Commemorates Hobart R. Homosexual (1894-1983), American general, and George Homosexual(1917-1994), Naval Aviator in World War II
Travel section: Visit These Happy Locales!
Homosexual Mountain, Virginia
Homosexual Spring, Tennessee
Homosexual Farms, Virginia
Homosexual Creek, Alabama
Homosexual, Georgia, Michigan and West Virginia
Homosexualville, South Dakota
Homosexual Hollow, Texas
AND Homosexual Head, Massachusetts!
Posted by What Big Implications You Have! / the sleuth / washingtonpost.com
Thanks to Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Christian Right, Gay, Homophibia, Internet, Media, Olympics, Right Wing, Right Wing Media
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The Earth: Love It or Lose It, Part V
Two Potential Components of Microgeneration
By Paul Spencer / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2008
Microgeneration may or may not present much of a solution for our increasing energy deficit; but it’s still fun, and it’s not counter-productive as a hobby, as long as we continue to do our personal duty of energy-use reduction and political agitation for renewable-energy generation. Within the category of microgeneration, there are a number of interesting inventions and ideas; but some of them make claims that are – well – unsubstantiated, if not physically impossible. For instance, some ‘rooftop’ wind turbine designers claim that a device that looks like an over-sized passive roof vent will supply a household’s energy needs. Ain’t gonna happen.
So – into that breach I leap. Last year I collected the pieces of an interesting puzzle – an experiment actually. Y’all might be interested in the results, when they become available. I should have some initial data this coming Winter. Ingredients (puzzle pieces): forty 6-volt, 180 amp-hour batteries; one 2.5 kilowatt, true-sine-wave, grid-tie inverter; 0.6 kw capability photovoltaic modules; five 4-feet by 12-feet, black rubber, solar-water-heating “pads”; two 275 gallon (U.S.) plastic water tanks; two ½ horsepower electric pumps; one water-to-air heat pump (5-ton capacity).
Here is an example of the water tank.
Here is the water-to-air heat pump (compressor/input-exchange end).
Here is one of the pads.
Here’s the theory, summarized: Water-to-air heat pumps use the well-known refrigeration cycle of expansion/compression [of a gas] to concentrate heat in one region of the machine and to remove heat from another region. For those who don’t know about the so-called geothermal heat pump system, it is typically based on pipes set about 1.7 meters deep in the ground, where soil temperature stays fairly stable at close to 10 degrees C in the temperate zones of the world. In Winter the refrigeration cycle is designed such that the heat pump pulls out some of the heat inherent in 10 degree water, sending, say, 5 degree water back into the pipes in the ground. The length of the piping system is calculated to permit the water to equilibrate at the ground temperature before returning to the heat pump. In Summer the system is valved such that the system reverses direction in terms of heat flow – the heated water goes out to the pipes in the ground. The piping systems are typically quite long, but the extent of the trenching can be reduced by digging wider trenches and looping the pipe as it is laid.
Another less-used system (that is also becoming more common) is to use black rubber pads with small channels fabricated into the length of the pads, manifolded into pipes running width-wise at either end of the pads, to capture solar-based heat in water flowing through these channels. In the U.S. swimming pools are sometimes warmed in the Spring and Fall by this method. Occasionally, these pads are used in conjunction with storage tanks to provide warm/hot water for ‘hydronic’ heating of floors – water-carrying tubes laid in thick mortar beds under tiles, for instance.
The idea/experiment here is to combine the heating via the black pads with a water-to-air heat pump. One ½ hp pump will drive the water from the storage tanks through the pads on the roof and back into the tanks. A second pump will take water from the tanks to the heat pump, when a house-interior thermostat demands hot (or cold) air.
Now we get to the particular arrangement.
Here are 5 of the pads deployed and plumbed on my roof.
Here is the plumbing within the garage (directly under the pads).
Next are a couple of close-ups of the plumbing by which you can see the basic arrangement. First, the outlets of the two tanks are in parallel and connected to a pump (in-between the tanks) that pushes water from the bottom of the tanks up to the lower-side connections of the pads on the roof.
The pipe from the pump ‘tees’ to the water-to-air heat pump inlet. (From the heat pump outlet there is a pipe that goes to the return inlets in the caps on top of the tanks. These are loose-fitting to allow air pressure to stay equalized during pumping – and for ease of removal, if the caps need to be unscrewed for some kind of tank maintenance work.)
Returning water from the pads (hopefully, somewhat heated) is collected by a second pipe connected to the top ends of the pads. This bottom-to-top circulation keeps the water in the pads in contact with the pad’s tubes for best heat transfer. This collection pipe comes through the roof above the mid-point between the two tanks and ‘tees’ to two pipes lined up with the tanks’ caps (also ‘teed’ to the outlet pipe from the heat pump). The southern tank line (left side of picture) also is ‘teed’ with a return pipe from the water-pump-to-roof pipe, which is valved. This allows the water to be fully drained from the pads on the roof when the pump is not being operated. Without it, water would remain in the pads and the pipe to the pads, and, when outside temperatures go below freezing, the pipe and pads would be damaged by freezing water. In case it’s not clear, the valve is closed when the pump is operating; open when the pump is switched off.
As you can see there are several manual valves in the system. Initially, valves will be set by me for various periods of data collection. Eventually, the idea would be to put in servo- or electro-controlled valves that would be controlled by a computer set up to analyze water temperature, ambient outside temperature, and in-house temperature via sensors. The controls could be timed, too. It might be reasonable to have a daylight-sensing input, as well, since that should be the salient factor for heating, plus the salient counter-factor for cooling.
As I stated in my earlier diary my roof is a south-facing roof in the Columbia River Gorge, 65 kilometers east of Portland, OR. This geographical location is poor for solar insolation, and we have fairly strong winds that might cause loss of heat in the pads just from moving-air contact. Also, the roof is a 12:2, which means that it makes an angle of about 10 degrees to the horizontal. At my latitude the optimal roof angle would be more like 45 to 50 degrees to the horizontal as a compromise for the angle of the Sun in the sky from mid-Autumn to mid-Spring. Not the best situation for solar heating.
I have the forty 6-volt batteries in two rows, which will be arrayed in four parallel-circuit groups, which will then be hooked up in series, so that I’ll have a 24-volt system to match my inverter. The picture of the batteries shows them just after I had built the shelves and placed the batteries; they are now covered, but not connected. The inverter is mounted, but, obviously, not connected either.
Two pictures
The inverter can make switching decisions such as: 1) if no exterior power (e.g., downed transmission lines), route from batteries to house demand; 2) if house demand is less than solar-based input, charge batteries; 3) if 2) and if batteries are charged, send to the exterior power grid (turn meter backwards).
I have 0.6 kw capacity of photovoltaics to install, but these should go up by mid-Autumn. At that point I’ll decide whether to buy more and whether to mount them on a structure that will, at least, allow me to vary the angle to the southern horizon.
That’s the update on the solar heating project. Here’s a diary in The European Tribune by ‘Marco’ on microgeneration, which said:
“There are an estimated 100,000 microgeneration units already installed in Britain.
“Nearly 90,000 of these are solar water heaters, with limited numbers of biomass boilers, photovoltaic panels, heat pumps, fuel cells, and small-scale hydroelectric and windpower schemes…
“But, with the right incentives, nearly one in five buildings in Britain would effectively become mini power stations, feeding electricity into the grid, or generating enough to be largely self-sufficient. Some of the greatest gains would be in combined heat and power units which are suitable for large blocks of flats, estates and businesses.
“In Britain, as in the United States, zoning laws and regulations are obstacles that are blocking greater investment of microgeneration of power, especially with wind turbines. Britons, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ‘have all had applications to erect wind turbines on their roofs turned down by planning officers.'”
Sorry, but this just makes sense. Small, propellor-type turbines have a high rotational speed, which makes them a potential disaster for birds and bats, at least. Beyond that, there are critical issues of manufacture (balancing, for instance), installation, maintenance, and monitoring (for fatigue failure among other conditions).
As one reader commented:
“Microgeneration should not include windpower at this time in urban areas. Virtually no urban areas of the world have enough of a wind resource to sustain the development of such an industry. Even windy San Francisco can’t sustain residential scale wind turbines except right on the coast, or the highest elevations. Better that neighborhoods be allowed to invest in commercial developments where the winds are strong.”
Another reader raised a particularly good point:
“However, there is also the question of …
… sweat equity. In a system where large numbers of people cannot reliably expect to sell as much labor as they are willing to offer to the market, microturbines of the kind that have half the generator mechanism expoxied into the turbine might have a cash cost that is appealing for some, even if the full economic cost including the notional cost of labor would make it appear uneconomic.
“When it is reducing total demand from the grid, it is replacing electricity sold at retail … if net metering is in effect, this is topped up during surplus generation periods by selling surplus power onto the grid.”
So – the second part of this diary – how about VAWT (Vertical Axis Wind Turbines) as a kind of hobby with low cost, low risk, and modest payback? I know the efficiency arguments concerning vertical-axis vs. propellor-style turbines, and they are likely correct, but take a look at this just for fun:
I suppose that it’s not self-explanatory, even in graphic form, but this device closes the vanes on the half of the cycle where the wind is driving the ‘wall’ and opens the vanes on the half of the cycle when the wind is opposing rotation. Does it actually perform as described? This is a picture from 1982 of my homemade model mounted in the back of my ’62 IH pickup truck. (I only drove used ‘cornbinders’ from county surplus sales from the late-’60s to the early ’80s. Larry Caroline introduced me to them.) I drove it down the road, and the ‘mill’ performed exactly as described. It started turning at about 5 mph, vanes started lifting and closing at about 7 mph, and it was spinning at a rather frightening rate when I hit 15 mph (and the vanes were still opening and closing, clacking away – no, it wasn’t my cornbinder’s valves). I didn’t dare go any faster than that, because I could also see that my lashing job wasn’t going to keep the device in my truck, if I didn’t slow down.
OK – this was an unbalanced model made out of pieces of stuff that I found in my garage, and the wood vanes made a fair racket. Now it’s time for me to make a more usable (and bigger) model out of materials that will endure and operate quietly. This time I won’t go for junkyard chic. In fact I will use materials that will test the cost factor for this design.
I predict that the cost for this type of device will be low, even with caging to prevent contact with anything larger than a dragonfly. As to conversion efficiency, I visualize a fairly reasonable torque that might be converted to high-speed rotation of an alternator via a simple belt drive – all right on the ground, where it’s relatively easy to support, to maintain, to replace, to whatever. Low wind-speeds due to ground interface? Probably, but the device should at least be responsive to changes in wind direction, however frequent and unpredictable. Y’all know the arguments, but this observation might be the clincher for going forward. This device can be made out of the “stuff in my garage”; it’s not a difficult job at all. If it turns out to be inexpensive to boot, what’s to lose?
What have y’all got for show-and-tell?
Go here for Paul Spencer’s all the entires so far “The Earth: Love It or Lose It” series on The Rag Blog.
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The Pork Barrel Thrives in This Administration
CEO of Firm That Signed Controversial Iraq Oil Deal Longtime Bush, Cheney Adviser
By Jason Leopold / July 6, 2008
Ray Hunt, the Texas oil man who landed a controversial oil production deal with Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government, has enjoyed close political and business ties with Vice President Dick Cheney dating back a decade – and to the Bush family since the 1970s.
Despite those longstanding connections – and Hunt’s work for George W. Bush as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board – the Bush administration expressed surprise when Hunt Oil signed the agreement last September.
At that time, administration officials said Hunt Oil’s deal with the Kurds jeopardized delicate negotiations among competing Iraqi sects and regions for sharing oil revenues, talks seen as vital for achieving national reconciliation.
“I know nothing about the deal,” President Bush said. “To the extent that it does undermine the ability for the government to come up with an oil revenue sharing plan that unifies the country, obviously if it undermines it I’m concerned.”
However, on July 2, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released documents showing that senior administration officials were aware that Hunt was negotiating with the Kurdistan government and even offered him encouragement.
Hunt also personally alerted Bush’s PFIAB about his oil company’s confidential contacts with Kurdish representatives.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, committee chairman, complained that the administration’s comments last year were “misleading.”
“Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed,” Waxman wrote.
Waxman said the Hunt-Kurdish case also raised questions about the veracity of similar administration denials about its role in arranging more recent contracts between Iraq and major U.S. and multinational oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and Chevron.
Plus, there’s the longstanding suspicion that oil was a principal, though unstated, motive behind the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, which sits on the world’s second-largest oil reserves.
Administration officials – and much of the mainstream U.S. media – have ridiculed the oil motive charge as a conspiracy theory.
Oil Deals
But many of the oil companies now stepping forward to benefit from Iraqi oil were instrumental in both supporting Bush’s political career and giving advice to Cheney’s secretive energy task force in 2001.
For instance, Ray Hunt’s personal relationship with the Bush family dates back to the 1970s as Hunt, the chief of Dallas-based Hunt Oil, helped build the Texas Republican Party as it served as a power base for the Bushes rise to national prominence.
The Hunt family donated more than $500,000 to Republican campaigns in Texas, while Hunt Oil employees and their spouses gave more than $1 million to Republican causes since 1995, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Ray Hunt also had strong ties to Dick Cheney during his years at the helm of Halliburton, the Houston-based oil-services giant. In 1998, Cheney tapped Hunt to serve on Halliburton’s board of directors, where Hunt became a compensation committee member setting Cheney’s salary and stock options.
In 1999, when Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush turned to Hunt to help fund his presidential campaign efforts in Iowa, according to Robert Bryce’s book, Cronies: Oil, The Bushes, And The Rise Of Texas, America’s Superstate.
“By the summer of 1999, Bush had already raised $37 million but he wanted to conserve his campaign cash so he turned to a Texas crony, Ray Hunt, to help fund the Iowa effort,” Bryce wrote. “In July of 1999, Hunt was among a handful of Bush supporters who each donated $10,000 to the Iowa Republican party.”
In May 2000, Bush appointed Hunt finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Hunt also donated $5,000 to the Florida recount battle and spent $100,000 on Bush’s inaugural party.
Bush Presidency
When Bush became President in 2001, Hunt emerged as an advisor to Cheney’s energy task force, according to highly placed executives at Hunt Oil whom I have been in contact with over the past seven years.
Bush also appointed Hunt to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and to the PFIAB, giving him access to highly classified information.
Hunt’s son, Hunter, a vice president at Hunt Oil, became another top energy advisor to the new administration, the company’s Web site said.
One of the topics before Cheney’s task force was the hoped-for opportunity for American oil companies to regain access to Iraq’s underdeveloped oil fields as a way to meet increasing U.S. energy demands.
That opportunity opened up after the U.S.-led invasion and conquest of Iraq in March and April of 2003, although a stubborn insurgency and political disarray slowed efforts to modernize the Iraqi oil industry.
Further bolstering Hunt Oil’s influence in the region in November 2003, Bush named James Oberwetter, a Hunt Oil vice president, to be U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Hunt Oil finally nailed down a major oil agreement with the semi-autonomous Kurdish region on Sept. 7, 2007. But the deal outraged many Iraqi officials because it was enacted before a national law could be adopted on the distribution of oil revenues. Bush administration officials also criticized the deal.
At the time, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, questioned whether Ray Hunt benefited from inside information from Bush, Cheney and/or other White House officials about Iraq’s stalled national oil law.
“As I have said for five years, this war is about oil,” Kucinich said. “The Bush administration desires private control of Iraqi oil, but we have no right to force Iraq to give up their oil. … The constitution of Iraq designates that the oil of Iraq is the property of all Iraqi people.”
Amazon Pipeline
The production-sharing agreement Hunt Oil signed with the Kurds is not the company’s first controversial energy project. Nor is it the first time the company has received help from the Bush administration for its work overseas, as documents obtained by Waxman’s investigators show.
In August 2003, the Bush administration threw its support behind the Camisea gas-pipeline project in the Amazon jungle in Peru that drew international criticism because it threatened to destroy a pristine stretch of rainforest and jeopardized the lives of indigenous people.
The London Independent reported that the beneficiaries of the project “would be two Texas energy companies with close ties to the White House, Hunt Oil and Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.” [Independent, Aug. 4, 2003]
When the pipeline deal went through, Hunt hired Halliburton to conduct the engineering work on the project as well as to build a $1 billion export terminal on the coast.
“Bush Pioneer Jose Fourquet played a pivotal role in the financing of a massive Peruvian natural gas project that benefited Hunt Oil Co., whose chairman, Ray L. Hunt, signed up to be a Pioneer and is a longtime ally of the president,” the Washington Post reported on May 17, 2004.
“Fourquet, the Treasury Department’s U.S. representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, rebuffed the official written and oral recommendation from other U.S. officials to vote ‘no’ on the project.
“Instead, he abstained on $135 million in financing for the project, allowing it to proceed. Opposition from the United States, a primary funder of the IDB bank, would have jeopardized the deal,” the Washington Post reported.
Wink and Nod
Now, the new evidence suggests that Hunt Oil at least benefited from the administration’s wink and nod in striking the Kurdish oil deal.
In a July 12, 2007, letter to PFIAB, Hunt disclosed that Hunt Oil was “approached a month or so ago by representatives of a private group in Kurdistan as to the possibility of our becoming interested in that region.”
Hunt described a visit of a Hunt Oil survey team and stated, “we were encouraged by what we saw. We have a larger team going back to Kurdistan this week.”
In a second letter to PFIAB, dated Aug. 30, 2007, Hunt revealed that he would travel to Kurdistan in early September for meetings with the Kurdistan regional government, including its president, prime minister and oil minister.
Those meetings led to the oil agreement between Hunt Oil and the Kurdish leaders — and now have raised questions about Bush’s denial that he had any advanced knowledge about the deal.
“State Department officials similarly disavowed involvement in the contract,” Waxman said in the letter to Rice. “Department officials claimed that to the extent they were aware of any negotiations, they actively warned Hunt Oil not to enter into a contract because it was contrary to U.S. national security interests.
“Documents obtained by the Committee indicate that contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil’s interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed.”
Waxman asked Rice to cooperate with the committee’s investigation. Hunt Oil declined to comment on Ray Hunt’s relationship with Bush or his administration.
Source. / The Public Record
The Rag Blog
Suicide : The Military’s Shameless Cover-Up
Hidden Casualties
by Eric Ruder / July 5, 2008
A year and a half ago, Scott Eiswert, a specialist in the Tennessee Army National Guard, returned from Iraq, only to face an escalating battle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When he learned that his unit would deploy again soon, he felt he could no longer stave off the pain. On May 16, his wife Tracy and his three daughters discovered his body after he shot himself in the family’s home.
Pfc. Jason Scheuerman left a note nailed to his barracks closet in Iraq. “Maybe finally I can get some peace,” wrote the 20-year-old man. Then he stepped inside the closet and shot himself. His parents only found out about the note after a yearlong fight to cut through military red tape and discover what happened to their son.
Scott and Jason are just two of the thousands of military personnel whose service in Iraq and Afghanistan plunged them into a place so dark that they took their own lives.
In fact, the number of suicides among veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan now likely exceeds the number of troops killed in combat.
Nearly one in five soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan–about 300,000–report symptoms of PTSD or major depression upon returning home, but only about half seek treatment, according to a Rand Corporation study released in April.
Based on known suicide rates for similar patients, “It’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,” according to National Institute of Mental Health director Thomas Insel, who is the government’s top psychiatric researcher.
But even more appalling than the human toll these wars are claiming even after troops leave the battlefield is the military’s shameless cover-up of the extent of the problem–and its effort to deny veterans the health care they deserve when they return.
The Pentagon officially reports that about 30,000 troops were seriously wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But USA Today found at least 20,000 cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) not reported by the Pentagon when the newspaper conducted its own study and filed numerous requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Rand Corporation study found that 320,000 personnel may have experienced a TBI in Iraq or Afghanistan, but only 43 percent said they had ever been evaluated by a physician for the injury.
As for PTSD, the Pentagon officially acknowledges that 38,000 veterans have been diagnosed with it since 2003–so if the Rand study of 300,000 soldiers with PTSD is accurate, that means some 260,000 have either not sought treatment, not been diagnosed or simply aren’t being counted by the military.
This isn’t surprising, given the culture of denial that pervades the military and veterans health care system. In April, for example, an e-mail surfaced from Ira Katz, deputy chief patient care services officer for mental health at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), acknowledging that 1,000 veterans under VA care attempt suicide every month. On average, 18 veterans commit suicide in the U.S. every day, and four of those are veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
“Shh!” begins the e-mail from Katz. “Is this something we should (carefully) address ourselves in some sort of release before someone stumbles on it?”
Another troubling e-mail from a VA official came to light in May. Norma Perez, a leading psychologist at a facility for veterans in Texas, wrote to staff members in March directing them to diagnose PTSD less frequently because PTSD patients can receive government disability payments for their condition.
“Given that we are having more and more compensation-seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” wrote Perez in the message to mental-health specialists and social workers. Instead, she continued, “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”
A diagnosis of adjustment disorder is considered less severe and isn’t typically compensated like PTSD, for which veterans are eligible for disability payments of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of their condition.
“It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which released the memo to the media. “Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”
Scott Eiswert had stopped going to the VA for PTSD treatment before his suicide, and the disregard for vets under its care was one reason why, according to Stacy Hafley, an advocate for military families who is helping the Eiswert family get back on its feet.
“He didn’t feel like it was helping,” said Hafley in an interview. “He thought they were leaning toward saying that his issues were ‘family problems,’ and not PTSD. So he stopped going, which is fairly common and symptomatic of PTSD.
“I’ve heard it so many times, and my husband, who also suffers from PTSD, did the same thing. So many feel that the VA is either trying to overmedicate or understate the scope of the problem, and neither of those is particularly helpful. They get frustrated, leave and don’t come back.”
Hafley underscored the chief problem facing an understaffed VA: “The VA is trying to build a million-dollar home with a penny, and it can’t be done,” she said.
The VA has an annual mental health budget of $3.8 billion, which U.S. officials contend is a substantial amount. But the U.S. spends this much every 11 days to keep U.S. forces fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In late June, Bush signed a new supplemental war spending bill, approved by Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress. The bill allocates an additional $162 billion of spending that will last into the middle of 2009, well into the term of Bush’s successor.
While the bill increases spending on GI education benefits, it contains nothing for expanding the budget for military health care. “The recent war funding bill was passed to go clear through the spring of 2009, which was clearly a political ploy to not have to deal with war spending right before the election, given that both candidates are sitting senators,” explained Hafley.
“I feel like they are playing political games with the lives of our loved ones. We shouldn’t be tolerating that. This has been going on for years. These aren’t new problems. These are the same problems that Vietnam vets have been facing for decades.”
Hafley is right. Fighting wars by skimping on compensation for the soldiers who must fight them is a tried-and-true strategy of every commander in chief. Successive Democratic and Republican administrations stood in the way of compensation for Vietnam veterans struggling with PTSD and Agent Orange exposure.
The Clinton administration dragged its feet when tens of thousands of veterans of the 1991 Gulf War struggled to get compensation for the dizzying array of symptoms they were experiencing, such as frequent immune system disorders, birth defects, cancer, chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, headaches, dizziness and loss of balance, memory problems, muscle and joint pain, indigestion, skin problems and shortness of breath.
Today, the military is employing a different arsenal to keep its overstretched military in the field at bargain-basement prices. “For the first time in history,” according to a cover story in the June 16 issue of Time, “a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool, but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope.”
Chris LeJeune, who returned home in May 2004, began struggling with depression while on a 15-month deployment to Iraq. The uncertainty about the mission itself weighed heavily on his conscience and contributed to his condition.
“When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor–things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would,” LeJeune said.
When LeJeune sought counseling, he got a prescription for antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, but not much else. “In the civilian world, when you have a problem, you go to the doctor, and you have therapy followed up by some medication,” said LeJeune. “In Iraq, you see the doctor only once or twice, but you continue to get drugs constantly.”
And that’s if you’re lucky enough to see a mental-health professional. According to Time, about a third of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan say they can’t see a mental-health provider when they need one.
Adding to the frustration facing the loved ones of veterans seeking help is the unresponsiveness of every level of government to the crisis.
Seeking to break the logjam, two veterans’ organization filed suit to ask a federal judge to order changes to how the VA delivers care to veterans. The suit sought redress for the lack of mental health care services, the long delays for appointments, and the four-and-a-half year backlog of cases in which veterans are appealing for a higher disability rating than was issued by VA doctors.
But the judge refused to grant the order, saying the plaintiffs were demanding nothing short of “a complete overhaul of the VA system.”
Hafley can think of only one other measure that would work better than a complete overhaul. “Quite frankly,” she said, “the best thing they could do to stop the overload at the VA is end the war, bring the troops home and stop creating more troops with PTSD who are at risk of suicide or having addiction problems. Adding more money into the VA does help the ones who are already home, but every day, new ones are being created.
“That influx is going to continue. Spending more money is just a temporary fix. They aren’t stopping the bleeding. And that’s the problem that brought us where we are now.”
The Rand Corporation’s study “Invisible Wounds of War” compiles information on veterans suffering from PTSD, TBI and major depression. The Rand site also has links to pamphlets with advice for individuals and families trying to cope with post-deployment stress.
To find out more about the Eiswert family and how you can help, go to the E-4 Scott Eiswert Memorial Fund.
In “Disposable heroes,” published in the International Socialist Review, Pham Binh covered the struggle of soldiers to get the government to devote adequate resources to compensating them for their service.
The Citizen Soldier is an excellent resource for active-duty soldiers looking for news and advice about their rights. Soldiers can also contact the GI Rights Hotline, or call 877-447-4487 from the U.S., 415-487-2635 from outside the U.S., or 06223-47506 from Germany.
[Eric Ruder writes for Socialist Worker, where this article first appeared.]
Source / Dissident Voice
The Rag Blog
Just Another Day in Amman or Baghdad
Cold Shoulders
by Kathy Kelly / July 6, 2008
Over the past two years, here in Amman, Jordan, I’ve regularly visited the family of Umm Hamdi, an Iraqi woman forced out of her native Iraq four years ago by terrifying death threats after her husband, very likely prey to that same threatened violence, disappeared. Although often met with the proverbial “cold shoulder” when trying to improve conditions for her family, she persists,–in the daytime she does child care for another family and, in the evening, she knits, sews, and makes handicrafts to sell in a local market. Umm Hamdi is tough, strong and fiercely determined to provide for her children. Nevertheless, she’s wretchedly insecure as a single mother and one more refugee among thousands in a country where resources to cope with her anxious needs are very slim. And she is worried for her son who is still in Iraq.
Two nights ago, I turned up to her small bare apartment during an evening when her young daughters were out in the care of a local charity and she was home alone. I saw how worn out she was from working to support them – but more telling on her is the frustration and remorse she feels for Hamdi, her teenage son, who is barred from entering Jordan because he is a young man over 15 years of age, and whether for fear of spillover violence or from a wish to concentrate its taxed charitable resources among women and children, Jordan’s policy strictly bars him entry. In Iraq, Hamdi lives with a family that resents him for his unemployed status, (there are no jobs), and can barely spare the little support they offer him.
Umm Hamdi is stricken with remorse over separation from her son. In regular phone calls, he learns that his sisters are going to school, that one has completed a vocational training program, and that when the oldest daughter was recently married the family did everything they could to give her a traditional wedding. The anguish overwhelms her as she recounts their latest conversation: “You do everything for your daughters,” he had shouted, over the phone: “everything for them, but what about me? What about me? I am your son!” She clutches her hands over her eyes. Between sobs, she repeats, “My son, my son.”
Her son is one of many thousands in Iraq who are out of luck, out of work, undereducated, and lonely for parents and siblings lucky enough to escape to neighboring countries.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says that poverty is driving Iraq’s boys and young men, out of desperation, into the militias. A 2007 IOM report noted that “militant fighters sometimes buy the loyalty of displaced persons by providing them some of the things they need, such as food and shelter. More and more children are joining these armed groups, the militias and the insurgents,” said IOM officer Dana Graber Ladeck. “Sometimes they do it for money and sometimes for revenge, but we’re finding more and more child soldiers, so to speak.” (January 30, Voice of America interview)
Some youngsters agree to carry guns and to man checkpoints for the strongest and most heavily armed militia in their country, the U.S. military. Reporting for Reuters, Adrian Croft recently wrote about a “ragtag band of men toting AK-47s at a checkpoint in Baghdad’s Sadr City,” some of 500 youngsters the US had recruited as part of a new plan to “strengthen the Iraqi army’s hold” in the backyard of U.S. rival Moqtada Sadr. (Jordan Times, June 27). New recruits risk their lives to earn $300 a month, guarding these checkpoints. It’s undoubtedly one of the best jobs in town. Will this option, will one like it, attract Umm Hamdi’s son?
Other Iraqi youngsters have been swept up by the U.S. military and sent to prisons, without charge, as a measure to prevent them from joining an Iraqi militia. On May 19, 2008, Fox News reported that the U.S. military is holding about 500 juveniles suspected of being “unlawful enemy combatants” in detention centers in Iraq. In August of 2007, in anticipation of the “troop surge,” CNN reported that the US had imprisoned, without charge, 800 Iraqi youngsters (or “security risks”) between the ages of 11 and 17, in a “prison school,” to prevent them from lending their bodies to militias as decoys or snipers. The CNN reporter said that, within the school, textbooks and classrooms were another “weapon” against terror. Commanding officer Lt. Glenn expressed his goal: “We ensure that when they are released that they don’t – they pick up a book instead of an AK-47 or laying an IED. And that’s what this really gets back to.” And when it gets back to young men like Hamdi, the message is perfectly clear: the U.S. will supply plenty of guns and explosives as long as the attacks are done in the name of protecting U.S. “security.”
Umm Hamdi doesn’t want her son to pick up a gun or lay an explosive device, for Iraq or for anyone. She would rather see him pick up a book. She cries herself to sleep at night wishing she could just see him. But she can’t bring her daughters back to the maelstrom of violence her native country has become with the U.S. invasion. And with Jordan straining to contain the refugees it has absorbed, she can’t bring her son out of Iraq.
Would it reassure her to think that Hamdi might find more secure shelter and achieve some educational goals if U.S. military jailers could imprison him for a year or so? Would it help if I told her that millions of impoverished parents in the U.S. worry that their sons might land in jail, and that many see the military as a better option?
I talked with her for a while longer. Her daughters returned from the event the charity had hosted for them, their faces sparkling with glitter and their arms colorful with painted designs. Umm Hamdi wiped away tears from a suddenly, forcedly, cheerful expression. She fetched a small ball of yarn – royal blue – and started rapid work to knit me a sweater, a parting gift I will take with me when I leave here. “It’s cold in Chicago, very cold!” she said, laying down the needles and yarn. She grabbed her shoulders to help me understand that she didn’t want me to have cold shoulders. “No, we don’t want you to be cold.”
Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
Source / Common Dreams
The Rag Blog
Time to Get Over the American Superiority Complex
Why I’m Not Patriotic
By Matthew Rothschild / July 2, 2008
(In memory of George Carlin.)
It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.
Spare me the puerile parades.
Don’t play that martial music, white boy.
And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.
You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.
It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.
Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.
Yet most people accept it without inspection.
Why?
For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.
The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism’s bayonet point.
World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions—notes left by the killer after the fact.
The millions of victims of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot have on their death certificates a dual diagnosis: yes communism, but also that other ism, nationalism.
The whole world almost got destroyed because of nationalism during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The bloody battles in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s fed off the injured pride of competing patriotisms and all their nourished grievances.
In the last five years in Iraq, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because the United States, the patriarch of patriotism, saw fit to impose itself, without just cause, on another country. But the excuse was patriotism, wrapped in Bush’s brand of messianic militarism: that we, the great Americans, have a duty to deliver “God’s gift of freedom” to every corner of the world.
And the Congress swallowed it, and much of the American public swallowed it, because they’ve been fed a steady diet of this swill.
What is patriotism but “the narcissism of petty differences”? That’s Freud’s term, describing the disorder that compels one group to feel superior to another.
Then there’s a little multiplication problem: Can every country be the greatest country in the world?
This belief system magically transforms an accident of birth into some kind of blue ribbon.
“It’s a great country,” said the old Quaker essayist Milton Mayer. “They’re all great countries.”
At times, the appeal to patriotism may be necessary, as when harnessing the group to protect against a larger threat (Hitler) or to overthrow an oppressor (as in the anti-colonial struggles in the Third World).
But it is always a dangerous toxin to play with, and it ought to be shelved with cross and bones on the label except in these most extreme circumstances.
In an article called “Patriot Games” in the current issue of Time magazine (July 7), Peter Beinart, late of The New Republic, inspects his navel for seven pages and then throws the lint all around.
“Conservatives are right,” he says. “To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.”
And then he criticizes, incoherently, the conservative love-it-or-leave-it types.
The moral folly of his argument he himself exposes: “If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice, and equality, why shouldn’t they love Canada—which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles—even more? And what do liberals do,” he asks, “when those universal ideals collide with America’s self-interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the net sum of justice and equality on the planet, after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic.”
This is a straw man if I ever I saw one, but if the United States gave a lot more of its budget to eradicating poverty and disease in Africa and other parts of the developing world, it might actually make us all safer.
At bottom, note how readily Beinart disposes of “liberty, justice, and equality.”
He has stripped patriotism to its vacuous essence: Love your country because it’s yours.
If we stopped that arm from reflexively saluting and concerned ourselves more with “universal ideals” than with parochial ones, we’d be a lot better off.
We wouldn’t be in Iraq, we wouldn’t have besmirched ourselves at Guantanamo, we wouldn’t be acting like some Argentinean junta that wages illegal wars and tortures people and disappears them into secret dungeons.
Love of country is a form of idolatry.
Listen, if you would, to the wisdom of Milton Mayer, writing back in 1962 a rebuke to JFK for his much-celebrated line: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Mayer would have none of it. “When Mr. Kennedy spoke those words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a society which did not immediately rebel against them,” he wrote. “They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better. Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man? He couldn’t, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society.”
When Americans retort that this is still the greatest country in the world, I have to ask why.
Are we the greatest country because we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?
No, that just makes us enormously powerful, with the capacity to destroy the Earth itself.
Are we the greatest country because we have soldiers stationed in more than 120 countries?
No, that just makes us an empire, like the empires of old, only more so.
Are we the greatest country because we are one-twentieth of the world’s population but we consume one-quarter of its resources?
No, that just must makes us a greedy and wasteful nation.
Are we the greatest country because the top 1 percent of Americans hoards 34 percent of the nation’s wealth, more than everyone in the bottom 90 percent combined?
No, that just makes us a vastly unequal nation.
Are we the greatest country because corporations are treated as real, live human beings with rights?
No, that just enshrines a plutocracy in this country.
Are we the greatest country because we take the best care of our people’s basic needs?
No, actually we don’t. We’re far down the list on health care and infant mortality and parental leave and sick leave and quality of life.
So what exactly are we talking about here?
To the extent that we’re a great (not the greatest, mind you: that’s a fool’s game) country, we’re less of a great country today.
Because those things that truly made us great—the system of checks and balances, the enshrinement of our individual rights and liberties—have all been systematically assaulted by Bush and Cheney.
From the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act to the new FISA Act, and all the signing statements in between, we are less great today.
From Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base and Guantanamo, we are less great today.
From National Security Presidential Directive 51 (giving the Executive responsibility for ensuring constitutional government in an emergency) to National Security Presidential Directive 59 (expanding the collection of our biometric data), we are less great today.
From the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to InfraGard and the Terrorist Liaison Officers, we are less great today.
Admit it. We don’t have a lot to brag about today.
It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex.
It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf—out of the reach of children and madmen.
Source / The Progressive
h/t Earth Family Alpha
And there’s this:
Written on July 4, 2008
Some Thoughts on Patriotism
By WILLIAM BLUMMost important thought: I’m sick and tired of this thing called “patriotism”.
The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from “communism”.
General Augusto Pinochet of Chile: “I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country.”[1]
P.W. Botha, former president of apartheid South Africa: “I am not going to repent. I am not going to ask for favours. What I did, I did for my country.”[2]
Pol Pot, mass murderer of Cambodia: “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.”[3]
Tony Blair, former British prime minister, defending his role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis: “I did what I thought was right for our country.”[4]
Read all of it, including notes, here. / Counterpunch
The Rag Blog
:
Canadian Court Sides With U.S. Deserter
Joshua Key on stage in Ottawa talking about his memoir The Deserter’s Tale. Photo by John W. McDonald.
Read a gripping excerpt from Joshua Key’s book, “The Deserter’s Tale,” at the end of this article. It is a revelation.
Ruling: Soldier witnessed enough rights abuses to gain Canadian asylum
OTTAWA — A Canadian court has sided for the first time with a military deserter who fled to Canada seeking refugee status, ruling yesterday that the U.S. soldier witnessed enough human rights abuses during a stint in Iraq that he could qualify for asylum.
The decision also marked the first time that the Federal Court, which has heard a handful of cases involving deserters, concluded that military action against civilians in Iraq violates the 1949 Geneva Conventions, an international prohibition against humiliating and degrading treatment.
Federal Court Justice Richard Barnes ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider the failed refugee claim of Joshua Key, a soldier who entered Canada with his wife, Brandi, and their small children in March 2005.
Key, an army private, deserted during a two-week break from serving as a combat engineer in Iraq, where he spent eight months in 2003 and says he was involved in military-condoned home invasions against civilians.
“This is a real breakthrough,” said Lee Zaslofsky of the Toronto-based War Resisters Support Campaign. “What excites us is this may also apply to other war resisters who took part in Iraq.”
Barnes ruled that the board too narrowly interpreted refugee eligibility by concluding only soldiers who seek protection from committing war crimes need apply.
“Officially condoned military misconduct falling well short of a war crime may support a claim to refugee protection,” said the ruling.
Barnes said it “cannot be seriously challenged” that some of the conduct in which Keys participated violated the Geneva Conventions.
“This included the responsibility for conducting night-time raids of private Iraqi homes in search of weapons,” said the decision.
“Pte. Key’s role in this was to blow open the doors with explosives and then to assist in both securing the premises and detaining the adult male occupants. Mr. Key alleged that during these searches he witnessed several instances of unjustified abuse, unwarranted detention, humiliation and looting by fellow soldiers, much of which he said was ignored by his superior officers.”
The Geneva Conventions prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” and “unlawful confinement.”
Key, 30, is the co-author of The Deserter’s Tale, a book about serving in Iraq and his flight from the U.S. military. He was born in Oklahoma in 1978, enlisting in the military in 2002. He now lives in Spiritwood in northern Saskatchewan and says that he suffers from post-traumatic stress, including insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations that “flash me right back to Iraq.”
His lawyer, Jeffry House, said it was not lost on Key that the ruling was released on July 4, the U.S. national holiday.
“He’s crossing his fingers that he and his family will be able to stay,” House said.
Source. / Times-Colonist, Victoria
Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog
Photo by Ishiku.
Why I fled George Bush’s war
What happened to make a patriotic, gung-ho soldier desert the U.S. army, and turn against the war in Iraq.
By Joshua Key[Joshua Key, 28, was a poor, uneducated Oklahoma country boy who saw the U.S. army and its promised benefits — from free health care to career training — as the ticket to a better life. In 2002, not yet 24 but already married and the father of two , Key enlisted. He says his recruiting officer promised he’d never be deployed abroad, but a year later he was in Iraq. Only 24 hours after arriving, as Key recounts in The Deserter’s Tale(Anansi), he experienced his first doubts about what he and his fellow soldiers were doing there.]
I was scared out of my wits that first day in Ramadi. Our own air force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles we began patrolling their streets, on foot. With nearly 100 lb. of weaponry, equipment and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow. It was just my platoon, 20 guys, walking single file through streets full of Iraqis. I could not stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat. Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food. I kept hearing the last words [my wife] Brandi said to me before I flew out: “Don’t you let those terrorists near you, Josh. Even if they are kids. Get them before they get you.”
I was awakened at 3 a.m. that first night and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists. Capt. Conde and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside. Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good — looking for contraband, caches of weapons, signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out damn fast. The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.
I had no idea what to expect. Would I charge through the door, only to be blown to bits by a grenade? Would somebody with an AK-47 knock my Oklahoman ass right back out that door? Would some six-year-old terrorist with two days of gun training be waiting to put me in his crosshairs? The minutes ticked on, and I wanted the hour to speed forward so we could get on with it. One or two guys did push-ups to pump themselves up. I borrowed Mason’s portable CD player and bombed out my eardrums to the beat of Ozzy Osbourne. It got me going. High and ready for action. I checked my watch, wished it would accelerate, and stuck some dip — Copenhagen, bourbon flavor — behind my lip. You can’t manage a cigarette when you’ve got an M-249 automatic weapon on your arm. So dip was best. Makes your mouth black as sin, and rots the roots right out of your gums, but dip was my nicotine hit of choice going into that raid.
I committed our instructions to memory. I knew the angles of the house, what door I would help blow down, how many floors were in the house, and who would do what when we busted inside. I would be third in the door, which means I was the second most likely to get shot if anybody had a mind to take us down, and I’d head to the left. Always, for every raid, I would be third in, heading left. I gripped my M-249. Yes, it could belt out 2,000 rounds a minute but only in theory. You couldn’t really hold your finger down that long. When you were blazing away like that, the bullets turned the barrel as hot as Hades. And if you held your finger down too long, it would warp the barrel.
It took thirty seconds for Jones and me to put the charge of C-4 plastic explosive on the door. Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn’t blow ourselves up. You’d be fried meat if you were anywhere near the explosion. I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged in. Jones went first — that skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot. With Jones leading the way we burst into the house, armed to the hilt. Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.
I’d never been inside an Iraqi’s house before. We charged through a kitchen. I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check everything, so I even opened the fridge. Perhaps, I thought, I would find guns or grenades hidden inside. No such luck. In the fridge, all I saw was a bit of food. In the freezer I found big slabs of meat, uncovered. No wrapping. No plastic. Frozen, just like that. We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall. In this room with the couches we found two children, a teenager, and a woman. We also found two young men in the house. One looked like a teenager and the other was perhaps in his early 20s — brothers.
We hollered and cussed. I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs. I knew they didn’t understand, but I hollered anyway.
“Get down,” I shouted. “Get the fuck down. Shut the fuck up.”
They didn’t know what “get down” meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, face down. We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye we zipcuffed them. Zipcuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight. They must have bit something fierce into those young men’s skin. There was no key, nothing — the only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.
We pushed the brothers outside, where 12 other soldiers from our platoon were waiting. The Iraqi brothers were taken away to an American detention facility for interrogation. I don’t know what it was called, and I don’t know where it was. All I know is that we sent away every man — pretty well every male over five feet tall — that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighbourhoods we patrolled regularly.
Inside, we kept on ransacking the house. The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house. We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor. We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband, weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction. We found nothing but a CD. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.
Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside. They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed. Outside, under a carport, I was assigned to watch the women and children. We weren’t arresting them, but we weren’t allowing them to go anywhere either. The family members couldn’t go back inside, and they couldn’t wander off into the neighbourhood. They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.
A girl in the family — a teenager — started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me. Inside, when we had been screaming at her and the others, I’d assumed that nobody understood a word of English. But this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even 100 lb., not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing. I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn’t move. I had my weapon ready. She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair. She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred.
In English, she asked me, “Where are you taking my brothers?”
“I don’t know, Miss,” I said.
“Why are you taking them away?”
“I’m afraid I can’t say.”
“When are you bringing them back?”
“Couldn’t tell you that either.”
“Why are you doing this to us?”
I couldn’t answer that.
I hoped she would not raise a fuss. I didn’t want her to start screaming, which could attract the attention of my squad mates. One or two, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.
I hadn’t been in Iraq more than 24 hours and already I was having strange feelings.
First, I was vulnerable, and I didn’t like it. Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that anywhere, at any time, any Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse. Second, with hardly one foot into the war, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there. Something was amiss. We hadn’t found anything in this girl’s house, but we had busted it up pretty well in 30 minutes and had taken away her brothers.
Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house. I didn’t enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport, in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi. Her questions haunted me, and I didn’t like not being able to answer them — even to myself.
Busting into and ransacking homes remained one of my most common duties in Iraq.
Before my time was up, I took part in about 200 raids. We never found weapons or indications of terrorism. I never found a thing that seemed to justify the terror we inflicted every time we blasted through the door of a civilian home, broke everything in sight, punched and zipcuffed the men, and sent them away. One raid was far worse.
It was a handsome two-story house and quite isolated. As usual, I put the charge of C-4 explosives on the door and we blew it in. As we rushed into the house, women were staggering out of their rooms. Three teenage girls screamed when they saw us.
Some of my squad mates grabbed them and held them at gunpoint, and the rest of us ran through the house. We found no men at all, just six more women in their 20s and 30s. The guys in my squad couldn’t find a thing, not even any guns — and it seemed that the more incapable they were of locating contraband, the more destructive they became. They smashed dressers, ripped mattresses, broke cabinets, and threw shelves to the floor.
Outside I found Pte. 1st Class Hayes with a woman under an empty carport. He pointed his M-16 at her head but she would not stop screaming.
“What are you doing this for?” she said.
Hayes told her to shut up.
“We have done nothing to you,” she went on.
Hayes was starting to lose it. I told her that we were there on orders and that we couldn’t speak to her, but on and on and on she bawled at Hayes and me.
“You Americans are disgusting! Who do you think you are, to do this to us?”
Hayes slammed her in the face with the stock of his M-16. She fell face down into the dirt, bleeding and silent. The woman lay still on the ground. I pushed Hayes away.
“What are you doing, man?” I said to him. “You have a wife and two kids! Don’t be hitting her like that.”
He looked at me with eyes full of hatred, as if he was ready to kill me for saying those words, but he did not touch the woman again. I found this incident with Hayes particularly disturbing because during other times I had seen him in action in Iraq, he had showed himself to be one of the most level-headed and calm soldiers in my company. I had the sense that if he could lose it and hit a woman the way he had, any of us could lose it too.
Then something happened that haunts my dreams to this day. All the women were led back inside the house and our entire platoon was ordered to stand guard outside it. Four U.S. military men entered the house with the women. They closed the doors. We couldn’t see anything through the windows. I don’t know who the military men were, or what unit they were from, but I can only conclude that they outranked us and were at least at the level of first lieutenant or above. That’s because our own second lieutenant Joyce was there, and his presence did not deter them.
Normally, when we conducted a raid, we were in and out in 30 minutes or less. You never wanted to stay in one place for too long for fear of exposing yourself to mortar attacks. But our platoon was made to stand guard outside that house for about an hour. The women started shouting and screaming. The men stayed in there with them, behind closed doors. It went on and on and on.
Finally, the men came out and told us to get the hell out of there.
It struck me then that we, the American soldiers, were the terrorists. We were terrorizing Iraqis. Intimidating them. Beating them. Destroying their homes.
Probably raping them. The ones we didn’t kill had all the reasons in the world to become terrorists themselves. Given what we were doing to them, who could blame them for wanting to kill us, and all Americans? A sick realization lodged like a cancer in my gut. It grew and festered, and troubled me more with every passing day. We, the Americans, had become the terrorists in Iraq.
In December 2003, Key went home on a two-week leave. He never returned to Iraq. Instead, Key went into hiding. The following March, he and his family crossed the Canadian border at Niagara Falls.
[Published by House of Anansi. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.]
Source. / Macleans, CA.
The Deserter’s Tale at Amazon.com.
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Tagged Authors, Books, Canada, Criminal Justice, Deserters, Geneva Conventions, GI's, International Law, U.S. Military
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