[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

[Jenifer Cartwright]

       This is so true, and so sad. A couple of weeks ago, guests on Washington Week were laughing... LAUGHING... about the 2000 election, saying that the only person who remembered and regretted the outcome was Al Gore, ha ha ha. 
       I intend to find the link and tell PBS that I'm angry enuff to send my WILL check to Bradley Manning Defense Fund.

--- On Sun, 6/2/13, David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net> wrote:

From: David Johnson <dlj725 at hughes.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] (no subject)
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;@mail0.frost.chambana.net
Date: Sunday, June 2, 2013, 9:04 AM



 
 




Monday, May 27, 2013



We've moved on 
from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice 




reprinted from the Guardian UK

Like 
characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned 
their backs and left a country in ruins 




   
  
  
    
    John Pilger 
    The Guardian, 

    Sunday 26 May 2013 13.00 EDT 
    

 
 
Iraq's ministry of social 
affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 
14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your 
eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming 
children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An 
internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in 
Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. 
"Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. 
Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of 
the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, 
then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have 
it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the 
genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my 
garden have mutated and can't be eaten."

Along the corridor, Dr Ginan 
Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was 
trying to save. Many had neuroblastoma. "Before the war, we saw only 
one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many 
cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital 
malformations is the same."

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was 
little doubt that depleted 
uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war 
were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war 
battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 
grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of 
nuclear warfare."

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to 
prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". 
The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s, 
wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, 
chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and 
British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were 
specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The 
WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in 
politics."

Recently, Hans von 
Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the 
United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US 
government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where 
depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental 
dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi 
ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains 
"damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its 
researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a 
"crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy 
metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the 
alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire 
families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event 
compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the 
two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F 
Scott Fitzgerald's The 
Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald 
wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or 
their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess".

The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a 
sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in 
Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair 
into his jackdaw travels and his money.
Their "mess" is a crime of epic 
proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social 
affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one 
or both parents. "This means a horrific 14% of 
Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are 
headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are 
rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has 
brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, 
Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his 
propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, 
"human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any 
means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 
'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the 
affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values 
versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal 
government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw, 
sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our 
counter-terrorism objective".

These crimes, their iniquity on a par with 
Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is 
of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our 
backs?

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