[Peace-discuss] thanks - primaries, elections forum

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thanks, Doug-

Kucinich and Sharpton have both had a positive
influence, I think, on the Democrats' agenda.  Of
course they couldn't have done it without an
international anti-war movement that put over 10
million people in the streets on one day with one
message, not to mention military folks like you and
military families like our upcoming guest, and the
families of people killed on 9-11, who have been
speaking out.  

Personally, I think the various parts of this movement
add up to the number one reason most of the
presidential candidates - and it seems almost all the
Illinois Senate candidates (thanks, Ken and Meg!) -
have been denouncing Bush's war to one degree or
another.  Of course, they do as little as possible
(and that's why we can't stop now).

Kucinich and Sharpton are the only ones who have been
consistently opposed from the start.  Dean was opposed
until the boots hit the dirt, and Kerry has gotten
more and more critical since his initial yes-vote, I
know, but as far as I know none of the viable
candidates have been principled on the occupation,
which is arguably worse than the invasion (more
Americans and Iraqis killed, etc.)

OK, I guess I'm giving my two cents despite what I
said before.  I won't go on, except to say that I
think it would be a big mistake for "us" to divert the
energies of such a successful movement to electoral
politics.  Now, before I get burned at the stake, let
me say that I don't mean that we shouldn't get
involved at all.  What I'm saying is that we can have
the greatest influence on policy (and on elections) by
doing what we have been doing: agitating, organizing,
mobilizing, demonstrating, protesting, speaking out
for principles, not candidates.

For one thing, if the Administration goes into
Pakistan or somewhere, the Dems need to hear it from
us first, loud and clear: support that crap and we
won't support you. 

Others, I'm sure, will think differently.

Ricky

     
--- Dlind49 at aol.com wrote:
> Ricky:  Of all the remaining candidates Dennis is
> the only one even half  
> good on peace issues. Glark is a shark in the
> swimming pool. He was on on setting 
> up these last wars- invasions- Balkans 94-95, 99,
> Aghanistan 2001-2002, and 
> Gulf War 2 2002. His part in evrything is a
> nightmare.  he has covered up more 
> atricities than you can imagine. 
> 
> as to kerry he abandoned vets and pow's while head
> of that committee.     
> 
> all these jerks know what is happening, why, and
> refuse to do anything about 
> it. 
> 
> as for bush-cheney-rumsfeld-blair-howard-scott each
> day gets worse....
> 
> if you want help from military point of view I wil
> be glad to help
> 
> another excellent resource is 
> 
> colonel david hackworth- his info is available at 
> 
> www.sftt.org
> 
> doug 
> ******
> 
> Washington conceals US casualties in Iraq
> 
> By David Walsh
> 4 February 2004
> 
> Use this version to print | Send this link by email
> | Email the author
> 
> The Bush administration is deliberately concealing
> from the American people
> the number and condition of US military personnel
> who have been wounded in
> Iraq. The efforts by those few politicians and media
> figures who have
> pursued the issue make this clear.
> 
> Estimates on the number of US soldiers, sailors and
> Marines medically
> evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 because of
> battlefield wounds,
> illness or other reasons range from 11,000 to
> 22,000, a staggering figure by
> any standard. Thousands of these young men and women
> have been physically or
> psychologically damaged for life, in turn affecting
> the lives of tens of
> thousands of family members and others. And the war
> in Iraq is less than one
> year old.
> 
> A recent piece by Daniel Zwerdling on National
> Public Radio (January 7)
> highlighted some of the difficulties in establishing
> the truth about US
> casualties. Zwerdling began by noting that few
> Americans seemed aware of the
> large number of US wounded in Iraq. He questioned a
> few dozen people on the
> street about the total number of American soldiers
> who had died in Iraq, and
> most answered more or less correctly. However, when
> the NPR correspondent
> asked about the number of US military personnel who
> have had to be evacuated
> with wounds, no one was close to the actual figure.
> The answers ranged from
> a few hundred to a thousand.
> 
> Zwerdling set about finding the actual number by
> contacting the appropriate
> government and military offices. A spokesman for
> Secretary of Defense Donald
> Rumsfeld told him to call US Central Command in
> Tampa, Florida. A spokesman
> there informed him that only Rumsfeld¹s office had
> such information. A
> spokesman for the Army provided with him the number
> of its personnel wounded
> seriously enough to be evacuated out of Iraq by the
> end of 2003‹8,848‹but he
> had no figures on Marines, Navy Seals or other
> forces. The United States
> Medical Command told Zwerdling they were still
> searching for the numbers.
> 
> Zwerdling contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel
> (Republican-Nebraska), a Vietnam
> veteran and former deputy administrator of the
> Veterans Administration.
> Hagel explained that he had been trying to obtain
> certain information from
> Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, including the ³total
> number of American
> battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. What
> is the official
> Pentagon definition of wounded in action? What is
> the procedure for
> releasing this information in a timely way to the
> public and the criteria
> for awarding a Purple Heart [awarded to those
> wounded in combat or
> posthumously to the next of kin of those killed or
> those who die of wounds
> received in action]?²
> 
> The Nebraska senator also wanted an updated tally on
> the number of US
> military personnel who had received Purple Hearts
> and the dates they were
> awarded. Six weeks later, Hagel received the
> provocative reply: the
> Department of Defense did not have the requested
> information.
> 
> The information on the number of Purple Hearts
> awarded is significant
> because it speaks to the total number of battlefield
> casualties.
> 
> In December, Mississippi Democratic congressman Gene
> Taylor raised the
> possibility that the Pentagon was deliberately
> undercounting combat
> casualties when he brought to light the case of five
> members of the
> Mississippi National Guard who were wounded in a
> booby-trap bomb explosion,
> but whose injuries were listed as ³noncombat² by
> the military. The truth
> emerged only because Taylor happened to speak to the
> most seriously injured
> of the five at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in
> Washington. Taylor
> indicated that he would send a memo to the other
> members of Congress ³and
> ask if anyone has had a similar incident.²
> 
> Other commentators have noted the discrepancy
> between the number of wounded
> in combat listed by the military and the large
> number of service personnel
> medically evacuated from Iraq, an action, one would
> imagine, that the
> military does not encourage or take lightly. In
> passing, for example, an
> article in the November 5 European edition of Stars
> and Stripes noted that
> the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany had
> ³treated more than 7,000
> injured and ill servicemembers from Iraq.² At that
> time, the military had
> recorded some 2,000 combat casualties.
> 
> The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge
> Ramstein US airbase, reported
> January 23 that the total of US medical evacuations
> from Iraq to Germany by
> the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of hostile and
> ³non-hostile² wounded
> by that point listed by the Army was approximately
> 2,750.
> 
> Julian Borger in the Guardian last August noted the
> odd imbalance between
> combat and ³non-combat² deaths and injuries. He
> cited the comments of Lieut.
> Col. Allen DeLane, in charge of airlifting the
> wounded into Andrews air
> force base near Washington, who had already seen
> thousands of wounded flown
> in and who told National Public Radio, according to
> Bolger, ³90 percent of
> injuries were directly war-related.²
> 
> US casualties mount
> 
> 
> 
> As casualties mounted last summer, US military
> officials did their best to
> suppress any discussion of the wounded total in
> particular. Only on July 10,
> almost four months after the launch of the invasion,
> CNN reported that for
> ³the first time since the start of the war in Iraq,
> Pentagon officials have
> released the number of US troops wounded from the
> beginning of the war
> through Wednesday [July 9].²
> 
> In keeping the number of wounded from the public,
> the military high command
> was aided by the American media. Editor & Publisher
> Online observed in July
> that while deaths in combat were being reported, the
> many non-combat deaths
> were virtually ignored and the numbers of wounded,
> in and out of battle,
> were being under-reported. Questioned by E & P
> Online, Philip Bennett,
> Washington Post assistant managing editor of the
> foreign desk, acknowledged
> blandly that ³There could be some inattention to
> [the number of injured
> troops].²
> 
> The sharp increase in the number of US wounded in
> the autumn‹the official
> number of combat wounded alone averaged nearly 100 a
> week between
> mid-September and mid-November
> (lunaville.org)‹made the reluctance of the
> military to provide figures increasingly
> problematic. Even the servile US
> media was beginning to request figures. Still the
> Pentagon officialdom put
> up as much resistance as it could.
> 
> In September 2003, the Post itself noted, ³Although
> Central Command keeps a
> running total of the wounded, it releases the number
> only when asked‹making
> the combat injuries of US troops in Iraq one of the
> untold stories in the
> war.²
> 
> Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, one-time candidate for
> the Democratic
> presidential nomination and ranking Democrat on the
> Senate Intelligence
> Committee, declared around the same time that he
> wanted to know how many US
> soldiers had been wounded in Iraq, but had been
> unable to find out because
> the administration would not release the
> information.
> 
> An article in the October 13 New Republic by
> Lawrence F. Kaplan noted:
> ³Pentagon officials have rebuked public affairs
> officers who release
> casualty figures, and, until recently, US Central
> Command did not regularly
> publicize the injured total either.² Ten days
> later, however, E & P Online
> commented, ³Current injury statistics were easily
> obtained...through US
> Central Command and the Pentagon, so getting the
> numbers is no longer a
> problem.²
> 
> In that same New Republic piece, Kaplan discussed
> the state of many injured
> soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He
> pointed out that modern
> medical technique meant that a far higher percentage
> of wounded soldiers now
> survived who would have died in previous wars. The
> use of Kevlar body armor
> had also reduced deaths. The result, however, was
> that many of the wounded
> were left with debilitating injuries, particularly
> amputated limbs. Because
> of the higher survival rate, information about the
> seriously wounded is
> essential to any accurate picture of the Iraq war.
> 
> Kaplan wrote: ³The near-invisibility of the wounded
> has several sources. The
> media has always treated combat deaths as the most
> reliable measure of
> battlefield progress, while for its part the
> administration has been
> reluctant to divulge the full number of wounded.²
> 
> The number of ³combat injuries,² however, is far
> from the whole story. That
> leaves out the thousands who have become physically
> or mentally ill in Iraq.
> As noted above, estimates of the real number of US
> servicemen and women
> evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 vary widely.
> 
> The British Observer newspaper asserted September 14
> that the ³true scale of
> American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new
> figures...which show
> that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been
> evacuated for medical
> reasons since the beginning of the war, including
> more than 1,500 American
> soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously. The
> figures will shock many
> Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in
> Iraq have been
> relatively light.²
> 
> By the end of November, Roger Roy in the Orlando
> Sentinel could place the
> number of those ³killed, wounded, injured or...ill
> enough to require
> evacuation from Iraq² at approximately 10,000. Roy
> noted that such figures
> were hard to track, ³leading critics to accuse the
> military of
> underreporting casualty numbers.²
> 
> Mark Benjamin of United Press International (UPI)
> has been one of the more
> assiduous in pursuing an accurate total of the
> number medically evacuated
> from Iraq. On December 19, Benjamin reported that in
> response to a request
> from UPI the Pentagon had provided a figure of
> nearly 11,000 US wounded and
> medical evacuations‹2,273 wounded and 8,581
> medical evacuations.
> 
> Benjamin cited the comments of Aseneth Blackwell,
> former president of the
> Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for
> people who lose a spouse in
> war, who said the country had not seen such a total
> since Vietnam. ³It is
> staggering,² she added.
> 
> Benjamin pointed out that the Pentagon¹s official
> casualty update as of
> December 17 reported only 364 soldiers as
> ³non-hostile wounded.²
> 
> The largest estimate of the number of medical
> evacuations from Iraq is to be
> found in a December 30 article by retired US Army
> Col. David Hackworth,
> ³Saddam¹s in the slammer, so why are we on
> orange?²
> 
> Hackworth writes, ³Even I...was staggered when a
> Pentagon source gave me a
> copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George
> W. Bush unleashed the
> dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000
> casualties in Iraq‹about the
> number of warriors in a line tank division.² The
> former colonel adds that
> the figure ³means we¹ve lost the equivalent of a
> fighting division since
> March. At least 10 percent of the total number²of
> available
> personnel‹135,000‹³has been evacuated back to
> the USA!²
> 
> Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military¹s
> Transportation Command told
> Hackworth that as of Christmas his ³outfit had
> evacuated 3,255
> battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle
> injuries,² a total 21,972
> servicemen and women. Ross, however, cautioned that
> his figure might include
> some of the same service members counted more than
> once.
> 
> The major categories of ³non-battle² evacuations
> included orthopedic
> surgery, 3,907; general surgery, 1,995; internal
> medicine, 1,291;
> psychiatric, 1,167; neurology, 1,002; gynecological
> (mostly
> pregnancy-related), 491.
> 
> Hackworth concludes that ³it¹s safe to say that,
> so far, somewhere between
> 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and
> Marines have been medically
> evacuated² from the war zone in Iraq.
> 
> ²Treated like dogs²
> 
> 
> 
> Once back in the US, the injured are stored in
> dozens of military medical
> facilities around the country, their existence
> virtually ignored by the
> administration, their plight largely unreported by
> the media.
> 
> Until a public outcry improved matters, many wounded
> veterans, UPI reported
> in October, had to wait ³weeks and months for
> proper medical help² at
> military facilities such as Fort Stewart in Georgia
> and were ³being treated
> like dogs,² according to one officer. The
> indifference of Bush, Cheney and
> Rumsfeld to the fate of US servicemen and women is a
> part of their general
> contempt for the broad layers of the working
> population, Iraqi and American.
> 
> The deliberate obscuring of the human toll of the
> war and occupation in Iraq
> is an indication of considerable nervousness within
> the Bush administration.
> Despite the official claims of overwhelming popular
> support, the political
> and media establishment knows full well that
> opposition to this war is
> growing, and that an accurate picture of the war¹s
> devastating consequences
> would further turn the tide of public opinion.
> 
> See Also:
> New signs of discontent in the military:
> ³Stop-loss² orders prevent soldiers
> from leaving US Army
> [20 January 2004]
> More questions on the deaths and illnesses of
> American soldiers
> [10 October 2003]
> Thousands of US troops evacuated from Iraq for
> unexplained medical reasons
> [9 September 2003]
> America¹s maimed come home from Iraq
> [30 July 2003]
> 
> 
> Top of page
> 
> 
> Readers: The WSWS invites your comments. Please send
e-mail.


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