Do 700,000 dead kids mean anything?

Do you have feelings one way or another about your friends in the media business? It’s easy, I realize, if you’re not particularly activated about the war, to have no opinion about what the media is or is not telling you. It’s easy to remain apolitical if the news you hear doesn’t resonate with any alarm. You ask: “Everyone is against the war, why belabor the point?”

Some weapons involved the deliberate targeting of childrenLet me put it to you this way. Let’s say that over the hill, on the other side of the world, 700,000 Iraqi children were being murdered. You may or may not know that, I excuse you for not knowing, 700,000 is a rough estimate extrapolated from the Johns Hopkins calculation that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion. We know that over half of the population are children. I can forgive you not knowing, but I have a harder time forgiving those who do know, and don’t want to tell you.

You’d think the death of 700,000 children would be cause for alarm.

Do you think if you knew about 700,000 children being killed, and that your fellow citizens knew, that you might be able to raise an objection, collectively, and prevail against your elected representatives to have the killing stopped? Perhaps we disagree on whether you could make a difference or not, or would be moved to make that difference. But I’m pretty damned sure that seeing 700,000 kids burned, strafed, sniped, exploded, starved, poisoned or run over, would prompt a universal humanitarian outcry, your voice included, and eventually the perpetrators would have to relent. That’s a likely reason, I believe, why you and others are not being shown the killing.

They watch 700,000 Iraqi kids die so you don’t have to.

Now what do you think of the people in the position to know, atop the hill, with an overview and the best analysts to deduce the horror being masked by military spokesmen? What do you think about those news people deciding not to tell you about it? The only people with the power to spread the word, with the power to save the children by alerting the rest of the world to the continuing slaughter; what is your opinion of those people?

Now it’s true, they have bosses who are beholden to the corporations that earn a ton from selling the weapons used to kill the kids. There’s oil afoot, and huge contracts, and all sort of profit to reap, and hell, an anti-capitalism spiritual belief system to tamp down. The corporate media have their reasons, and the newscasters are but people like you and me trying to hang on to their jobs. But 700,000 children. Should you begrudge the bastards 700,000 Iraqi children?

I’ve called them bastards, those with the means to cry out the alarm for the next 700,000 children who’ll die by the hands of our soldiers, our administrators, or our neglect. They won’t tell you about it, and you’ll profess your ignorance and meanwhile resent all attempts at intercession. I say those newsmen are bastards who would cover up for the crime of 700,000 murdered children. In what kind of regard do you hold them?

Garrett Reppenhagen Winter Soldier

COLORADO COLLEGE- Iraq Veterans Against the War held a mini- Wintersoldier hearing this evening at the Max Kade Theatre in Armstrong Hall. They screened the original 1970 documentary, originally unseen in this country and unavailable until just recently on DVD. Afterwards four soldiers told of their experiences in Iraq. IVAW chairman Garrett Reppenhagen told an interesting story:

Have you ever seen pictures of fighter planes which bore tiny icons beneath the cockpit indicating how many planes they’d downed? Well some US soldiers in Iraq were putting little “car” stickers on their windshield to show how many cars they’d bumped off the road or totaled. Military vehicles are instructed to stop for nothing, so cars moving too slowly or stopped by traffic are simply hit and pushed out of the way. Commanders eventually had to forbid the stickers when the drivers’ views were being impaired by too many stickers. You could earn half stickers for dogs, or bikes or people.

Garrett was at the 50mm gun in a convoy when the humvee ahead swerved to hit an Iraqi child. The vehicle did not come close enough so the driver swung open his door to extend his reach. Garrett explained that armored doors are so heavy that they require two soldiers to lift them on or off their hinges. He’s certain the Iraqi boy was killed on impact.

When they returned to their FOP, Garrett was relieved to see an officer approach the guilty driver and scold him loudly for his actions. Later the very disgruntled soldier revealed that he was not reprimanded for striking the boy, but rather for having opened his door, exposing his fellow soldiers to the risk of gunfire.

Police state runs amok in Eldorado Texas

Residences for families of breakaway Mormon sectLet’s face it, Republican US President, George W. Bush, and Republican Texas State Governor, Rick Perry, are simply in total cahoots in coordinating the incredible police state witch hunt going on in Eldorado, Texas. The US police state is running amok and this is a test case for how much the government can get away with in denying US citizens their constitutional rights.

And where are the damn Democrats? I thought that these great leaders were grand protectors of civil rights? Is everybody just going to remain totally silent and complicit with this government child abuse and disregard of all citizen rights? Right now, it certainly appears so, doesn’t it? This is a test case, and the report card for all so far, is FFF. Make that F- PLUS.

The number of kids removed from the Eldorado, Texas religious compound is now over 400, with 133 women taken away, too, as if they were mere children. This is the federal police state and their local henchmen posing themselves as grand and noble knights on white horses, saving the maidens and the children from bad men folk, we are all to suppose? Not hardly. And yet, nobody has been charged with any real crime! Talk about going fishing Texas sized. This is Dick Cheney out fishing! Feel that hook in America’s heart?

What is to be established here? That the federal government and/ or local and state governments can treat ordinary US citizens as if they were Afghan civilians in a war zone? Bombs away? What happened to due process of civilian law? We are now all presumed guilty until; we are proven innocent by government authorities, who meantime can do anything they want with our kids, our families, and everybody? Cooperate, or else! So?

Under normal law in a non-police state, if the police has charges against somebody, they arrest that person and charge them with a crime. They don’t go out and throw the lives of around 600 people into total turmoil, including traumatizing small kids. This America we have now is shameful and disgusting. It takes the complicity and apathy of all of us to allow this charade to continue as it is. Shame on the Democrats for not speaking out! Shame on them! And shame on all of us for simply tolerating the abuse of our fellow citizens by police thugs.

Battle of Haditha in the eyes of artists

MASSACRE AT HADITHA by Tanya Tier, an interpretation of MASSACRE IN KOREA by Pablo Picasso, about NO GUN RIWhile US Marines were acquitted for the 2005 murder of the 24 Iraqi civilians, THE BATTLE OF HADITHA has hit the theatres in England. The Times Online and Time Out London review UK documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield‘s dramatization of the rampage. It opens in NYC on May 7.

British soldiers mete out royal beating

British soldiers beating young rock-throwersSomeone in the UK has got hold of a video, lovely, showing British soldiers beating Iraqi boys whom they’d caught throwing stones. Have a look. The cameraman, American, does a voice-over mocking the kids, “please don’t hurt me,” as the soldiers bludgeon and kick them repeatedly.

Do we treat Iraqis worse than dogs?

Smiling executionerEveryone’s in an uproar about laughing US marines who videotaped themselves throwing an Iraqi pup off the edge of a cliff. I’m so embarrassed Americans can’t show similar alarm for the disposing of Iraqi children or babies. Hopefully this might lead some to be indignant at our soldiers’ equally well reported disrespect for human life.

Dear soldiers, keep the Youtube videos coming. Show us the children you are running over with your convoys, the women and infants you snipers are whacking like moles, the crowds you strafe indiscriminately, the families you bury with missile strikes, the detainees you torture. Put all that on video with your grinning psychopathic smiles. I mean, show us MORE of that. Eventually one of the videos will accidentally include a dog as collateral damage, or a dog losing its owner. Then Americans will empathize.

Winter Soldier testimonies coming to DC

Winter Soldier film features confessions and documentation of American atrocities in VietnamThe IVAW are really pulling it together this year. And they’ve set upon an ambitious strategy that has precedent with Vietnam antiwar vets. Winter Soldier Redux, Washington DC, March 13-16, 2008.
 
In 1970 veterans of the Vietnam war convened in Detroit to share personal confessions of their part in atrocities perpetrated against the Vietnamese. The documentary made of these transcripts was kept from the US public and has only recently become available. Click here for some clips on YouTube.

A kernel of un-truth

food industry fascists
If you’ve met me, even for five minutes, you know that I hate the US food industry with great gusto. Every single day, though I try very hard not to, I read something about the obesity epidemic and the alarming rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. The list of woes goes on ad fricking infinitum.

Before I rip on the government, who should be watching over the food industry to ensure that our food supply is safe and nutritious, but most assuredly isn’t, not only because they are fascist bastards who love corporate goodies, but also because they are fucking idiots who know absolutely nothing about health or nutrition…. breathe….. before I rip on them, let me say that the joke known as the food pyramid has actually, finally, been revised a tiny bit in the right direction. Still, the pyramid only addresses the quantities of food that should be consumed and doesn’t speak a word about nutrition, so it’s still pretty worthless.

What do you think of when you hear the word enrich? Does it conjure up images of a living thing, mangled and dissected until nothing of value remains? Do you picture its skeletal carcass, picked clean by vultures and bleached in the desert sun until it is devoid of not only life, but color as well? If somehow it fell upon you to enrich the poor dead thing, what would you do? Dress it up in fancy clothes? A nice hat? Maybe even googly eyes?

Do you know why the food industry is so good as to enrich wheat flour after they’ve milled it, discarded the nutritious parts, and bleached any remaining life out of it? Why they then throw worthless synthetic vitamins in the coffin? A guilt offering perhaps. But more likely its because they have to for their bleached white flour to be considered, get this, FOOD.

I’ll cut right to my point. A kernel of wheat, or a wheat berry, is a living thing, a seed. It consists of three separate parts: the bran, the germ and the inner core, the endosperm. A kernel of wheat contains over 30 different nutrients, dispersed throughout the component parts, and is the primary food source for most of the world. In the US, instead of acting as our nutritional savior, as the good Lord intended, most wheat isn’t even food.

But I don’t buy bleached flour! I buy stone ground whole wheat products! Sorry to tell you but once a kernel of wheat has been milled, even if it is not subjected to the atrocities committed on its less fortunate counterparts, it is still nearly worthless, possessing only 10% of all vitamins, minerals and trace elements found in a wheat berry. As soon as wheat is ground into flour it begins to oxidize. Within 24 hours, most nutrients have dissipated into the atmosphere, and spoilage sets in soon after. Freshly-milled, highly-nutritious whole wheat flour has almost NO shelf life. Which is why the food industry spends so much time and money on our eventual enrichment.

My poor kids have suffered for years under my ruthless hatred of American flour. They are the physically fit, calm and well-behaved little souls who forlornly peel their Clementines while cruel classmates taunt them with flour-y treats. They are the oddballs, the misfits, the outcasts. At least they were.

Now I buy hard red wheat kernels at Mountain Mamas for $.67/lb. I grind the flour in my handy Nutri-mill (For purposes of full disclosure, this runs about $250. I’ve had mine for 10 years, no trouble). Within minutes I use the freshly ground flour to make cinnamon rolls, muffins, cookies, waffles and other delicacies. My kids are popular again and, almost more importantly, stuffed full of 30 vital nutrients. They have good physical health and energy, good mental health, stable moods. It’s a happy place, this home.

If you do one thing this year to improve your life, grind your own flour and learn to bake a few things. And never ever ever believe that the US food suppliers, or the US government, cares one iota about your health and well-being.

Darfur round and round table discussion

No imperial intervention on the pretext of DarfurPeople please come prepared to the Darfur round table discussion tomorrow night. The in-house event at the PPJPC is intended to bridge a perceived divide that our organization may be telegraphing regarding non endorsement of the Save Darfur organization and other like efforts. Is the PPJPC for western intervention in Sudan or against, military and/or economic?

I’m hoping a moderator will be able to preempt filibusters by spirited missionaries intent on witnessing with descriptions of Janjaweed atrocities until the rest acquiesce in submission.

Come prepared to be informed, but please do the background research. The discussion time will be limited and will be quite ill-served, I think, with a chorus responding “I didn’t know snake oil was both TASTY and LESS FILLING.”

If you can read about the Darfur Crisis, you can read why it is also considered the Darfur Controversy.

The iron fist of the marketplace

Burmese priests protestThink you’re the only one who’s come to the conclusion that the average person can be relied upon only as far as you can drag him by the ear? Do you lament that the common sense of common heads put together adds up to a hill of beans?

If you think you know better, your challenge might be to cajole or inform, in hopes of motivating the herd, where others high on the food chain would simply ride roughshod.

Burmese monks leave their sandals behindI find it odd to use animal kingdom analogies to explain human behavior when Homo Sapiens comprise neither competing species, genus, class or phyla stalking each other.

Of the nurture versus nature, I mean carrot versus stick herd management option, which approach do you observe governments most often employ? In public schools it’s authoritarian, on the streets it’s civility so long as people submit appropriately to their fleecing. But as recent events have shown, dissent has meant government reaction with black gloves, masks, armor padding, truncheons, and low tech brutality. Every aspect something you’d expect more from those traditional masters of persuasive communication, the mobsters.

The people most alarmed by totalitarian repression are the educated class who over the centuries have fought for every liberty their overlords were forced to yield. The working classes represented the leverage used to negotiate each concession, and thus came along for the ride. But its muscled ranks have always served as the labor pool for the thugs the governors would use to fight any progressive reformers.

Your police departments all have riot gear to don in the event of civil disturbances. Can you say you’ve approved of their harsh measures in the event of your getting hysterical? That equipment isn’t for soccer hooligans, it’s to break strikes and beat back political assemblies.

We’ve seen police around the world fire on crowds assembled peaceably in Burma, Mexico, Tibet and Iraq. In New Orleans we’ve seen police taser crowds of people just like us, who wanted to protest a public meeting where the decision was being made to condemn their houses.

If you think massacres are beyond the pale for our corporate overlord class, think again. If they can do it without inciting a mass rebellion, they will. The independent minded people of East Timor were massacred with US weapons and the tacit complicity of a media which let it happen off camera. So long as you don’t see it, it doesn’t bother anyone’s conscience apparently. Children labor as slaves in Bangladesh, Africa and Asia for our corporations. You don’t see it, so it’s not a problem. For the profit-mongers all corporate genocide is OK, be it by economic starvation, accident, contamination, or pollution. If you could understood the depravity inherent in their exploitation of world poverty and its resources, can you doubt they’d hesitate to fire live rounds into a crowd who threatened their rule?

The War in Iraq

the war no more
In my opinion, noted chronicler Ken Burns, whom I otherwise respect, does Americans a great disservice to title his multimedia WWII homage THE WAR.

I do resent the President and his enablers admonishing Americans for what may or may not be appropriate behavior “in a time of war.” We were not “at war” during the Cold War or the War on Drugs. And the War on Terror is equally an [existential, so-called] abstraction. Fighting terrorists, including the invasion of Afghanistan, is a police action. If we are talking about apprehension. Missile strikes are extra-judicial assassination. Undeclared military aggression.

But since our soldiers are being sent to war, and there is profound anti-war revulsion, and congress is being asked to collude by providing war funding, and we are detaining combatants which at a minimum should be awarded Prisoner of War status, we cannot escape discussing Iraq as a war, and most notably as an illegal war.

So when Ken Burns calls his WWII tome THE WAR, isn’t it more than slightly dismissive of veterans of all combat since? The Vietnam War lasted three times as long as WWII, to Baby Boomers it was the war. The Korean War, termed a “conflict” to avoid having Congress refuse a declaration of war, is now called the Korean War, even tragically the Forgotten War. World War One before it was The First World War, was known as The Great War, even the War to End All Wars. De facto it WAS THE WAR, but imagine anyone thinking to call it that in the midst of WWII.

Does Burns mean to deny [The] Iraq [War] its significance, even as he might suggest it lacks the legitimacy of WWII, the Just War? As Iraq casualties and atrocities slip from the headlines, it’s hard to see the diversion of WWII nostalgia as helpful.

Iraq may turn out to be simply the opening salvo of THE WAR declared by the corporate west on all of humanity. It deserves its due.

On not inciting a lynch mob

Do you know about the atrocities being committed in Darfur? Is the extent of your reaction being weighed as evidence about how much you know (ie. not enough)? If you are not calling for UN peacekeeper intervention, does it mean you have not exposed yourself sufficiently to the suffering of the Sudanese?
 
This would appear to be the logic of those advocating action/intervention. Surely you are a heartless do-nothing if you are not urging the tugging of every heartstring until a collective decision can prompt swift action. Cool heads might not prevail against a revenge-driven mob mentality, but why split hairs, they are hairs on the necks of Arabs.

When agitators urge action, if even they caution it to be non-violent action, the challenging endeavor of creating non-violent dialog and diplomacy can easily appear to stagnate in the “inaction” category.

The bigger picture about Sudan is that Europe and the US now face an eastern power vying for Africa’s remaining resources. To continue to dominate Africa, they have to mobilize opinion to favor a reversal of what has been a de-colonization consensus granting indigenous peoples their regional autonomy. To this end, grassroots activist mechanisms are being co-opted to manufacture public consent for re-shouldering the white man’s burden. A critical distinction for those concerned for the Sudanese is that western intervention is not the only solution. TO SAY NO TO MILITARY INTERVENTION IS NOT TO ADVOCATE DOING NOTHING. It is fine to raise awareness about the suffering in Darfur but maybe not if the common denominator response is an agitated public crying for blood.

You’d be the odd man out, trying to talk a lynch mob out of meting out justice to the Jesse James Gang. Where would you stand as you saw tempers becoming raised in response to heightened emotional manipulation? No one wants to deny the crimes committed, but what of the mechanisms of a civil society meant to preempt our baser compulsion to vigilante justice?

What if as well, the James Gang members the crowd was after were only the small fry? What if incredibly, the chief mob rouser was Jesse James himself? Perhaps even Jesse James would not have such gall, he would have to work through deputies like think-tank and media mouthpieces, or more insidiously through funding-starved non-profits, and tragically through unknowing surrogates with the best of intentions.

Ideologically it shouldn’t make a difference who is behind justice or before it. No one should be victim to a mob’s wrath. That’s not the point. What if you were working the crowd, trying to build an awareness that the Jesse James Gang was in their midst wreaking disaster of unfathomable consequence? Meanwhile the attention of that populace was being diverted to a humanitarian crisis which was in fact entirely a symptom and not a cause.

The Darfur crisis, begun in 2003, far from being ignored by our media, has successfully been used to obscure the million people killed by the US in Iraq, and the Israeli incursions into Lebanon and Palestine, both of which have been labeled genocides. Neither the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon nor in Palestine have drawn criticism from the lobbyists behind Save Darfur or the Genocide Intervention Network. What outlaws!

Black Fire- Indigenous with an attitude

Black Fire is good music. Defeated Nations, Native American- Sacred Spirit.

Indigenous Protest, Resistance, and Dissent

The Totonacs, to better understand the Anglo population of Colorado by seeing it in another country. More about indigena and mestizos

They teach ‘Colorado Indians’ in grade school in District 11. But what do they really teach you, Safiyyah? We need to learn more.

“The Road To Hell” $500,000 in Department of Defense Funding to Kansas University for Mapping of Communally Held Indigenous Lands in La Huasteca and Oaxaca, Mexico.

The face of legally blind patriotism

Prosthetic eye with Marines emblemGunnery Sergeant Nick Popaditch lost his eye in the assault on Fallujah. His new glass prosthetic features a holographic emblem of the US Marine Corps.
 
This Veterans Day, Sergeant Popaditch was awarded a medal for pioneering an innovative combat technique. Presuming an ambush, Popaditch called in an airstrike, then drove his tank forward under cover of the C-130 gunship before its firestorm had subsided. As a result Popaditch was injured, but in his words: “(We were) just inflicting a devastating number of casualties on the enemy, and we did it in a way that no one had ever done before.”

This is the same tank commander immortalized on magazine covers in 2003 smoking his cigar as he assisted in toppling Saddam’s statue in Firdos Square. Articles told later of Popaditch’s tank named “Carnivore” storming Fallujah in retaliation for the contractors killed by jubilant Iraqis. Now he’s grabbing attention with his Few-The-Proud cornea. When we recoil at WWII accounts of the Death’s Head Regiment and other unthinkably morose nomenclature and regalia of the enthusiastic Nazis, can we fathom the imaginative horrors of our own X-Box-born killers?

Popaditch acted courageously by venturing into an ordnance maelstrom to certain injury. But whose kind of hero?

United Nations pedophile ‘peacekeepers’

Everywhere in the US liberals want the United Nations to get involved and send in the ‘UN peacekeepers’, even though the UN Security Council is totally controlled by the American government.

And let’s face it, at times the UN troops act in some ways like the US troops do in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in some ways even worse! Like many of the ‘peacekeepers’ having sex with minors in areas under their control.

This has happened over and over in Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Haiti, East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo,and yes, Sudan, too. See UN Child Sex Slave Scandals Continue and the latest S Lanka troops ‘abused Haitians’ .

Why are liberals so enchanted about having UN troops being sent into a country? The UN is a total mess and totally under the control of the US. Isn’t it time to stop calling or desiring for the UN to do the US’s mop up operations?

Silencers

Did Blackwater sneak silencers into Iraq? That’s a good question, because silencers are used mainly by snipers. Is this the true face of bringing ‘democracy’ to Iraq?

Is sniping using silencers done by a private Pentagon- contracted corporation of death squad personnel what Iraq is all about for the US government at this point? Yes, it is certainly so. What else can one expect from a government that loves ‘water-boarding’ its captives so?

That and rendering. Dictionary meaning of ‘to render’ is ‘to try out oil from fat, blubber, etc., by melting.’ ‘Rendering’, a favorite phrase for US government death squad work. Yes, the US government, Pentagon, and Blackwater would be using silencers, too. America’s face to the world.

Al Gore?

Al Gore? What a joke the Nobel Peace Prize is! Gore is the most laughable winner since all together now, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin got the prize in 1994.

I take that back. This is the most laughable recipient since Woodrow Wilson got it in 1919.

Who even remembers the majority of winners of this prize? Willie Brandt for example? Or Frank B. Kellogg, who supposedly stopped World War 2 from happening?

Now Gore gets to join on board this illustrious list of Peace Prize big winners alongside Henry Kissinger, who won in 1973! How proud he must be… Awarding a peace prize for a man that never spoke out against the atrocities the US committed against Iraq while he was in office as US VP is shameful. Not to mention that he still is no voice of peace against the current Iraq War continued forward by Bush after he left office.

For further commentary see A Grand Misjudgment, Gore’s Peace Prize at counterpunch.org

George W. Bush, Holocaust denier?!?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to much of the US press, supposedly has denied that there was a Jewish holocaust. In some countries of Europe, that can get you a jail sentence even.

In fact, the whole US House (minus only 2 Congressmen) voted to get the UN to go after Ahmadinejad for being a Holocaust denier. They want the UN to jail him! But what about President George W. Bush? This BBC report just in

Yes, it turns out that our very own US president is a Holocaust denier. He seems so honest and educated, but there you have it. He is asking the very same US Congress that wants Ahmadinejad punished for supposedly denying the existence of the Jewish Holocaust, he wants that very same Congress to deny the existence of the Armenian holocaust of WW1!

Can you stoop any lower than this? Can you be any dumber than this? I think not. Jail George W. Bush for being a Holocaust denier! Jail him now!

Somalia- a US-made genocide in the making, tying it all in together

Even as the US spreads its intentional genocide into Somalia, there are naive US liberals vocally demanding that the US intervene yet more into Africa, to supposedly stop genocide, they say!

Somalia’s main market for the whole country just burned down yesterday, a direct result of the war that the US unleashed on the country by its bombings of the country and then using Ethiopian troops as the US proxy army. Fire engulfs main Somali market US military contractors the Ethiopians are, so to speak. It is a made-by-the-US genocide that is slowly unfolding in that country.

Cry for the Somali people which the UN itself has says is now has the worst humanitarian crisis at this time in Africa. I have yet to see many (if any?) US pacifist antiwar activists demanding that the US get its butt out of Africa. What the hell are they waiting for?

We need to stop now with all our confusion and mobilize. It seems that the national, state, and local antiwar coalitions are led by folk addicted to solely staring at their own navels. At times, they appear to have entirely forgotten that the US is waging a total planetary war and just seem to be on Cloud Nine with their religous dogmas.

WE… CAPITAL LETTERS… are the problem, not the Bush gang all by itself. I have sat through 2 excruciatingly silly soul trips by local followers of this creed in the last few days about the importance of using only non violence. Religious paralysis and delusions that we have a democratic system where voting matters at this point gives people the excuse to do so little. Just get out of the house and talk to your neighbors and get them to make up some signs and do something together. It’s nonviolent! Then do it, please.

US Out of Africa Now! US citizens out of their king-super-boxes now! And please stop all this nonstop drivel about peaceful non-violence all the meanwhile sitting on your collective asses! Non-violence hardly worked in Myanmar, but at least the Buddhist monks got out and tried.

The US pacifists still are in church though. LITERALLY. Or in little group get togethers talking about much of nothing except the importance of being non-violent. Meanwhile, their opponents are entirely too violent yet the pacifists are out to lunch giving out hugs and love to them. Or ignoring their pro-war opponents’ activities altogether.

Why does nobody care about the genocide in Congo?

In less than 10 years, 4,000,000 have died in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and now the fighting threatens to erupt once more in the Eastern regions of that country. Why doesn’t anybody care about stopping this genocide? Here is a report from France24 English language news.
 
When you combine this slaughter with the slaughter that earlier occurred in Rwanda, 5,000,000 have died in about 15 years. Add in the killings in Uganda, and the figure goes still higher. Instead of solving this mass war, the US instead is provoking new wars in the Horn of African countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia!

Generals among the cherry trees

Military brass speaking truthfully
The Washington Post, uncredited for being a chief jingoist newspaper behind Bush’s war making, weighed in on the General Petraeus Westmoreland testimony, indignant that of all things, the general’s credibility should be questioned.

General Petraeus had an exemplary record apparently, commanding the 101st Airborne. That division may still have cache in recollections of D-Day, but I remember those guys in the news in Iraq. In Fallujah, before we leveled it, the 101st initiated a gunfight with unarmed schoolboys who were protesting the requisition of their school for an American encampment. That was back in the days when individual atrocities, if they got past the media censors, seemed to draw outrage. Before Iraq became one single atrocity too dangerous for reporters to visit, a hand-basket already delivered which General Petraeus will testify, beyond reproach, is still well in hand.

Call out Alliant Techsystems & CACI too

ATK is chief supplier of poisonous Depleted Uranium
Other military industries complicit in war crimes in Iraq have offices in Colorado Springs at Academy and Fountain Blvds.
 
ATK Alliant Techsystems is the leading supplier of Depleted Uranium, which is poisoning the Iraqi populace as well as our soldiers. Ft Carson vets who father children with birth defects will know whom they can hold responsible.
 
Interrogators at Aby Ghraib were supervised by CACILikewise, CACI International provides “security solutions” to our boys overseas. Celebrated, ie leaked, examples were the torture methods employed at Abu Ghraib.
 
To be fair, abuses at Abu Ghraib were also administered by Colorado Springs neighbor TITAN CORP, now L-3 Communications Titan Group.
 
Isn’t it amazing that so many culprits of Iraq atrocities are represented in Colorado Springs, at ACADEMY AND FOUNTAIN?! Our visit on Tuesday will be straight into the midst of these callous profiteers.