Iraq Casualties

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a “town meeting” with
Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the
value of freedom of information, saying that he is a “supporter of
non-censorship” and that open access to information was a “source of
strength.”

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president
himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US
troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk
about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian
style control over information.

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

By Dave Lindorff

We’re been here before, many times.

The US causes massive civilian deaths through its indiscriminate use of heavy air power, and then tries to claim it’s the enemy’s fault for “hiding” among the civilians and “using them as shields.”

In Vietnam, where the US was fighting against a local revolutionary movement that was seeking to overthrow the puppet regime backed by America, American planes routinely bombed and napalmed villages, claiming that the Viet Cong were hiding amongst the peasants. Women, old men and children would die in droves—several million of them by the time that war was over--and we’d be told it was all the fault of the Communists, who, we were told, had no regard for innocent life.

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional
wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not
seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for
crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and
promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

By Dave Lindorff

Celeste Zappala, the Gold Star mother of an early casualty in
America's invasion of Iraq who lost her son when he was doing guard
duty during a fraudulent "search" for alleged WMDs in Iraq, was
speaking from the heart when she told a group of antiwar demonstrators
at Philadelphia's Independence Mall Saturday that she was grateful no
American troops had been killed during the past week in Iraq.

Her concern for the troops' well-being is understandable.

But left unsaid is that the lower US casualty figures in Iraq are
coming at the expense of much higher civilian casualties. This is even
more true in Afghanistan, where the war is heating up.

By Dave Lindorff

Laid-off American workers will be getting temporary extended
benefits as the nation sinks into recession, thanks to Congressional
Democrats, who cleverly tacked a funding provision onto a bill giving
the president all the money he asked for (and then some) to fund the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars on out through next June. Veterans of the
Iraq War will also be getting tuition benefits equal to the full cost
of in-state public college tuition plus $1000 a year for books and
supplies.