I often here from young men, a lot of them gay, who are about to join the military. Most often they’ve seen the movie and see how much I was supported by my fellow Marines who were all straight. They’re as excited about joining up as I was before I went in. Sometimes they’ve heard me speak at some rally or another and they relate to my love of my country. It’s kind of weird that when it comes to my opposition to the Bush/Obama policy in the Middle East, their ears stop working. I left the Marine Corps that I love dearly because I could no longer serve in occupations which I believe to be insuring future terror attacks. So here’s my letter to the latest one where I tell him about the last guy who wrote to me for advice on serving as a gay man:

Dear ______,

I just had several email exchanges with another young man who started the conversation with the fact that he had seen the movie on Showtime and had some concerns about going into the military since he was gay. I kind of got the feeling that he was so hell-bent on going that he… I don’t know, basically he just wanted me to say “you’ll be fine, Bruh. Just don’t act like no bitch or nuthin’…. Bruh.” Ends up he, like every queer man I’ve ever met almost, has all this internalized homophobia and is convinced that the military is gong to fix that. I’m not saying that’s the case with you. What I wanted to talk to him about was our foreign policy in the Middle East and to help him make sure he was 1000% behind the mission. After all, he might have to take innocent life or give up his own or his mind or parts of his body in support of the mission. Actually, I’m wrong, he didn’t find me by seeing the movie about me, he found me through reading Dahr Jamail! Dahr’s a very smart, very compassionate man who was an un-embedded journalist in Iraq. He’s written several books. In one, “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he talks about me and my crisis of conscience surrounding Iraq. Anyway, I thought it was at least unusual that this guy is reading Dahr Jamail and isn’t even thinking about why serving in the occupations might not fit with his morals. I guess he just Googled “gays, marines, Iraq” and got that hit. (kind of amazing he didn’t get porn. he probably did)

So in the end, and to make a long story short, he ended up telling me how closed minded I was for trying to help him explore he feelings about our policies there. What a fucking Jerk, man! I am up to my eyeballs in my to-do list and I took the time to talk to this guy honestly about my feelings about what’s best for my nation and because I didn’t send him any tips on “how to put on cammie paint and not look like a fag” advice, he’s all “you’re just closed minded that’s all.” Goddamn, I work so hard to process all this ancient homophobia and then some guy like this comes along and that’s all it takes for me to start hating again. My inner Aaron James McKinney is awakened!
So once again, I’m not saying that you are anything like him but if you really want my advice about joining the military, I’m going to have to talk to you about the morality of how our military is being used right now. If you’re down with that, I’ll continue the conversation but if you’re going to get pissed with me that I won’t play G.I. Joe with you and if, in the end after taking the time, you’re going to insult me for even trying to talk to you about broader issues, let’s not move forward.
This may sound weird coming from a guy who doesn’t even know you but I care about you. If for no other reason that in a time of “what’s in it for me” you are considering putting yourself in a situation where you might have to sacrifice a lot of yourself, even to include your life. That level of selflessness is unusual these days. Beyond sacrificing your own life, as an officer, you might be put in a position where you have to sacrifice a lot of other people’s sons and daughters. I’ve co-counseled with a lot of vets over the last five years. Some of the most heartbroken ones are the ones who make it out but sent others to their death.
On September 11th, 2001 we were mercilessly attacked on our own soil. Because of the clusterfuck of our nation’s attempt to respond to it and ALL the political banter and the ways that the left and right have upped their level of combat, American against American, we have completely lost our ability to look at what happened on that awful Autumn morning and what we should have done and now that we’ve fucked it all up, what we should do as we attempt to move forward without making things exponentially worse as the sand keeps falling!
I’m willing to have that conversation with you, about what the right approach to thwarting future 9-11’s is and what that means for you personally as a man who’s thinking about joining the fight; but only if on the other side of it I’m not going to get kicked in the teeth for caring enough about you to say some things you might not want to hear.

Respectfully,

Jeff Key

by Dahr Jamail

“A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.”

What might these numbers be if the Civilian Contractors were included in these figures?

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 16 (IPS) – According to a soldiers’ advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are “definitely” too low.

Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today.

“I see the ugly,” Luther told IPS. “I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don’t want to look at this, including the military.”

Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier’s Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors, knows about these types of internal problems in the military because he has been through many of them himself.

Luther told IPS that he believes the real number of soldiers at Fort Hood committing suicide is being dramatically underreported by the military.

“There are suicides of active-duty troops occurring regularly both on and off base,” Luther said. “One of them I knew personally since I served with him in Iraq and he was one of my soldiers, and they still have him listed as under investigation for suicide.”

“From what I know right now, there are at least three suicides they are not reporting at all. Most notably, there is a soldier who committed suicide that the Army confirmed through a press conference, and this is not being reported, and I’m working with the Pentagon to try to find out why that is not being reported,” he said. “The Army won’t even release his name.”

Yet Luther believes the situation is even worse.

“I definitely believe there are more than these. If this is what they’ve hidden from us that we know of, we can rest assured there are many, many more than this. We filed a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to get information from them [Army], but they bog you down in red tape,” he said.

Due to the military’s continued attempts to mask the true number of suicides in the ranks, along with an ongoing refusal to make the radical policy changes necessary to properly treat soldiers and psychiatric care providers exposed to secondary post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Luther fears the worst for the future.

“There will be more 5 November [referencing the recent Fort Hood tragedy] attacks on fellow soldiers, and they will likely be even more drastic,” he said.

“Everybody has to outdo someone, so the next are likely to be worse. Violence breeds violence. I was trained to be very violent in combat as a scout…we killed or detained Iraqis before anyone else got there. Two months ago I warned the Army’s Chain of Command that before we had an attack by a soldier on other troops when they come home, we needed to make some dramatic changes.”

At the time of the interview, one week after army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s shooting rampage left 13 dead and over 30 wounded at Fort Hood, Luther informed IPS that in the previous three days at Fort Hood, “I’ve heard commanders tell soldiers requesting psychological help that they are full of crap and don’t have PTSD…so if we can’t implement these needed changes quickly and rapidly we are going to have more loss of life on U.S. soil by soldiers killing other soldiers.”

While not on the scale of the recent shooting incident, several other killings by soldiers have been reported at Fort Hood over the last two years.

According to official military statistics, Fort Hood already suffers the highest number of suicides among Army installations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Luther believes the number is far higher, Army officials at Fort Hood admit to at least 10 suicides on the base from January to July of this year, and at least 75 “confirmed” suicides since 2003.

Several years of repeated war-zone deployments are taking their toll, as Army personnel are experiencing record rates of PTSD, depression, other mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicides.

According to the Army Suicide Event Report, a total of 99 soldiers killed themselves in 2006, the highest rate of military suicides in the 26 years the military has been keeping statistics on suicides. More than a quarter of them were by troops in combat postings in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure does not include post-discharge suicides by military personnel.

In 2007, at least 115 suicides were reported by the Army, another record. Last year set another record, with at least 133 reported suicides, in addition to there being a record number of suicides in the Marine Corps that year.

The suicide rate for the Army for 2008 was calculated roughly at 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, which for the first time since the Vietnam War is higher than the adjusted civilian rate.

Thus far, 2009 is on pace to set another record for the number of suicides in the Army.

Private Michael Kern, an active-duty Iraq war veteran who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008.

On Nov. 9, four days after the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Kern told IPS, “The 20th Engineering Battalion was hit hard in this rampage. They are scheduled to deploy in January to Afghanistan, and lost a lot of good folks on Thursday [Nov. 5]. I personally know a soldier in that Battalion who attempted suicide last night.”

Mental health problems and suicide appear to now be systemic in the military.

By October 2007, data within the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicated that approximately 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan were coping by taking prescription antidepressants and/or sleeping pills to cope.

In 2008, the Daily Telegraph of London reported that two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to be on antidepressants.

In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan – 300,000 in all – report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment.”

A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.

The options on the table before the Obama Administration War Cabinet all involved escalating the occupation by as many as 80,000 troops. The president wants other options as he continues dithering.

President Barack Obama is not satisfied to execute on any of the options his national security team have brought to the table, “pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government”, the Associated Press (AP) reports tonight from a senior administration official. The Afghan government has shown itself to be nothing more or less than a brutal mafia. The druglords and warlords are now the taxmen—rightfully scrutinized for being immoral, but actually just acting as a government.

The news comes as Karl Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, “sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise”, The Washington Post reported earlier from senior officials.

At today’s meeting with the War Council, Mr. Obama entertained—what was referred to throughout the day as—”the four options”, which WaPo reported would cost around $1bn per thousand troops. Christi Parsons and Julian Barnes reported them at the Los Angeles Times as:

1. At least 40,000 additional troops, the ‘medium-risk’ option from General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of the U.S.-led occupation—the ‘low-risk’ option being an escalation of 80,000 troops;
2. 34,000 additional troops, including 23,000 for combat and support, 7,000 for the occupiers’ command base and 4,000 trainers, officials confirmed over the weekend;
3. 20,000 additional troops, the ‘high-risk’ option from Gen. McChrystal—”known by military planners as ‘the hybrid’,” WaPo reports, “to shore up security in 10 to 12 major population areas”; and
4. around 12,000 additional troops, supported by Senator John Kerry (D-MA), more geared toward counterterrorism operations, maintaining the same troop level for counterinsurgency.

Mr. Obama was “leaning toward” escalating the occupation by 34,000 and announcing it after his trip to Asia in a week, Jonathan Landay reported at McClatchy over the weekend.

“The sense that he was being rushed and railroaded has stiffened Obama’s resolve to seek information and options beyond military planning, officials said, though a substantial troop increase is still likely,” the AP reports tonight, adding: “The options presented to Obama by his War Council will now be amended.”

Since Mr. Obama began his presidential run in early 2007, he referred to the occupation of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”. Leading political scientists, notably Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, see no reason for such an assessment.

Counterterrorism operations have been dubbed by human rights groups and military officials as “death from above”, as strikes have killed 49 civilians for every terrorist leader assassinated. It’s uncontroversial such civilian casualties are counter-intuitive to “winning the hearts of minds of the population”, as Gen McChrystal reported to the president was crucial to avoid “mission failure”.

The argument for shifting to a counterterrorism mission is the concern over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the possibility of Afghanistan or Pakistan becoming a ’safe haven’ or ‘base of operations’ for ‘terrorists to conduct operations against the U.S. and the fulfillment of juvenile revenge fantasies over 9/11.

Seymour Hersh wrote of the politics toward understanding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at The New Yorker over the weekend, of which Little Alex partially analyzed. He discussed the battle between the military and the White House over the Afghanistan occupation and his article with Rachel Maddow this evening (7:18):

Here at Wonderland, we’re not giving the president as much credit as Mr. Hersh. (In his defense, Mr. Hersh was probably not aware that the reports actually stated there was no indication Mr. Obama would cease to escalate the occupation, as Ms. Maddow mistook.) Our message to the president remains the same: Stop dithering and bring the troops home, now!

To execute a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies would need to commit at least another 100,000 troops to begin building an Afghan Security Force of 400,000. This assessment was made by us before military officials confirmed the number, 600,000, as the amount of counterinsurgent forces needed to begin stablizing Afghanistan.

“Nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try,” George Will wrote at WaPo over two months ago. “Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.”.

On Veterans Day, we’re reminded of the deaths of U.S. soldiers during war, but the casualties of war remain, recklessly, forgotten.

“On MSNBC, and the other cable hawkers of government propaganda this morning, veterans were absent, despite the constant invocation of Veterans Day,” Lew Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, commented. “All the photos and discussion were of active-duty troops in the various U.S. occupations. None of the kids with missing limbs or brain parts were shown, the actual veterans, nor that single-payer Hell, the V.A. medical system and its inmates. It was all lies about the glory of war, by a caw-cawing bunch of chickenhawks.”

In-action U.S. casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan total over 90,000, on record. “That includes a tire-screeching 75,134 dead, wounded-in-action, and medically evacuated due to illness, disease, or injury in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and 14,323 and counting in Afghanistan, or Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF),” Kelley B. Vlahos reports at AntiWar.com, adding:

Larry Scott, who runs VAWatchdog.org, an invaluable daily monitor of ongoing issues affecting the 23.4 million living U.S veterans, said the 90,591 figure relating to OIF/OEF casualties is valid—and ultimately overwhelming. “People just forget, they don’t realize there is an ongoing cost of war. Whether you agree with the war or not is not the issue. We have to be ready to pay the price.”

Documents from the government and non-governmental organizations have found that 170,000 veterans of the Vietnam Counterinsurgency have committed suicide, Dahr Jamail reported at AntiWar Radio today. The Veterans Health Administration confirmed in an email dated 15 December 2007: 6,552 veterans commit suicide every year—126 every week, 18 every day. Any suicide survivor can attest to the fact that the casualties of every suicide are exponential to the statistic itself.

The RAND Corportation, according to the Online Journal in April 2008, stated around 300,000 troops sent to Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering major depression or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—better known as shell shock—and nearly 370,000 received traumatic brain injuries.

Any native of a nation-state invaded by the U.S. Armed Forces can attest to the fact that for every U.S. casualty is a potential nationwide population of human beings and property and natural resources damaged or destroyed.

Mr. Obama won the 2008 presidential election with 52.9% of the vote. That was a year ago. Today, a CNN poll reports 56% of those polled oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan and 58% oppose the occupation as a whole.

Mr. President, politics has a price. Life does not. Morality exceeds value. Integrity makes you a man. Defying power with integrity makes you a leader.

End the occupation of Afghanistan. Yes, you can.

2 parts

airing during 11/22 to 12/4/2009 in Ventura (see air times)

airing 11/23 and 11/30/2009 in other cities in Ventura County (see air times)

click to see full interview

Dahr Jamail - award-winning, independent journalist

Interview with Dahr Jamail, award-winning, independent journalist and author of “Beyond The Green Zone” and his most recent book “The Will To Resist” and website “Mideast Dispatches”. Interviewed by Cindy Piester with PULSE TV. Discuss Ft. Hood, Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers’ resistance and U.S. foreign policy including Obama administration. Produced by Maverick Media and filmed at CAPS TV Channel 6 in Ventura, CA on Nov. 9, 2009.

Cindy Piester - host and producer of PULSE TV

bp0.blogger.com/_ICCoEC9hSwc/RltBQaUOxGI/AAAA..

Injured Hearts, Injured Minds

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49173

Good Morning, Conflucians. The big story of the day is the massacre at Fort Hood in Texas. Last night it was reported that the shooter, Major Malik Nadal Hasan, was dead. But he is still alive and in stable condition even though he was shot several times. It still isn’t clear what motivated Hasan, who was a both a devout Muslim and a psychiatrist and was going to be deployed to Iraq at the end of November. A short time ago, the 13th shooting victim died. Reports say that 31 victims were injured.

From The New York Times: Suspect Was ‘Mortified’ About Deployment to War

Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.

But Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 39-year-old man accused of Thursday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., began having second thoughts about a military career a few years ago after other soldiers harassed him for being a Muslim, he told relatives in Virginia.

He had also more recently expressed deep concerns about being sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying Da

Hasan may have posted sympathetic writings about suicide bombers on the internet. Someone with the same name did so, according to this and other stories. Hasan had not told his family he was scheduled to be deployed to Iraq.

More Stories on the Shooting and Aftermath:

Army post shooting rampage leaves 13 dead, 30 hurt

NYT:
Army Doctor Held in Fort Hood Rampage

NYT: Shooting Victims Flood Local Hospitals

Raw Story: Muslims fear backlash in wake of Fort Hood massacre

Other stories on Hasan:

SF Examiner: Troubling portrait emerges of Army psychiatrist suspected in rampage at Fort Hood, Texas

Roanoke Times: Suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan: Social awkwardness kept with him into adulthood

Analysis of the Fort Hood Story

There is an excellent discussion of the significance of the story by Dahr Jamail at Truthout: Mass Shooting Indicates Breakdown of Military

Jamail interviewed a soldier at Fort Hood who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The soldier says that the mood on the base is “very grim,” and that even before this incident, troop morale has been very low.

“I’d say it’s at an all-time low – mostly because of Afghanistan now,” he explained. “Nobody knows why we are at either place, and I believe the troops need to know why they are there, or we should pull out, and this is a unanimous feeling, even for folks who are pro-war.”

After a similar incident in May, in which

a US soldier gunned down five fellow soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon that the shootings occurred in a place where “individuals were seeking help.”

“It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress,” Admiral Mullen said. “It also speaks to the issue of multiple deployments.”

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by repeated deployments in war zones; stress that is further exacerbated by limited time at home in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

How much longer will our government continue sending people back to Iraq and Afghanistan even though they are suffering from serious psychological disorders?

We need to end both of these wars, but will President Obama have the courage to do it when it might mean he’ll be a one-term President? That is what Gary Wills claims in a recent blog post at The New York Review of Books blog. Wills foolishly believes that Obama has the will and the guts to do what Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon didn’t do when we were in Vietnam. Poor Gary. He’ll wake up to reality eventually, no doubt.

OTHER NEWS

Wall Street Firms getting H1N1 Vaccine ‘ahead of hospitals’

Pelosi scrambles for health care votes

Details on Health Care Bills in House, Senate

Pentagon pursuing new investigation into Bush propaganda program

Deal Over Honduran Crisis ‘Dead’

Families in Cleveland Wait for ID’s of Victims

Texas polygamist sect member found guilty of sexual assault

After all that horrible news, here’s an interesting story from developmental psychology and specifically my own field–language development.

Babies ‘cry in mother’s tongue’

Babies Cry With an Accent, Study Finds
Newborns Cry With the Melody of Their Parent’s Language

I hope today will be a better day than yesterday.

THANK GOODNESS IT’S FRIDAY

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Columbus Day: The myth of ‘America’ by Dahr Jamail

A Columbus Day meditation by Thom Hartmann

Israel will not allow war crime trials over Gaza from AFP

Honduras: Coup troops raid TV station from Narco News

Surveillance footage of masked coup invaders from The Field

Argentina: New media laws ’settle old debt with democracy’ from Deep Dish

Free speech: Gagged from reporting on British parliament from The Guardian

Obama accused again of concealing Bush-era crimes from Truthout

Nobel Peace Prize: He won because he speaks of peace by Andrew Stelzer

White House vs. Fox News: NY Times & Raw Story & The Nation

Noam Chomsky’s books banned at Guantanamo

Acorn foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001

10 guidelines for funding citizen media from PBS Idea Lab

Broadband isn’t just the web, its our future from Giga Om

Public library technology access study from Benton

Broadband mapping: Connected Nation fuels controversy

Colleges want net neutrality to keep costs down from E School News

Round up: How will net neutrality impact investments from WA Post

Users of Sidekick phones lose data, Microsoft to blame? from Reuters

Why Dan Rather’s suit against CBS was dismissed from FindLaw

Will The Rachel Maddow show survive as liberals turn off TV?

News Corp reportedly interested in share of NBC Universal

New Arbitron ratings system under the microscope from FMQB

Arbitron’s flawed ratings hurt minority radio from The Hill

Mini newscasts for attention deficient viewers from Broadcasting & Cable

100% of LA’s medical marijuana dispensaries illegal? from Raw Story

Market research: Overestimation of Twitter effect on Bruno from LA Times

Webcasting helps conferences get more inclusive from PBS Media Shift

Every year Project Censored publishes its Top 25 Censored stories in the US. Project Censored has been documenting censorship in the US media since 1976 and has trained thousands of students who have participated in this project. The Top 25 stories are always published in book form and this year the introduction was written by independent journalist and author, Dahr Jamail.

Here are the Top 25 censored stories for the past year:

1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street

2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s

3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates

4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina

5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products

6. Lobbyists Buy Congress

7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past

8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions

9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza

10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate

11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine

12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief

13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War

14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts

15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco

16. US Repression of Haiti Continues

17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan

18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature

19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor

20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates

21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare

22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team

23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud

24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion

25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

US Soldiers Find Themselves Being Terrorists in Afghanistan

As the US continues to step up war efforts in Afghanistan, the number of American soldiers refusing deployment to war zones is also increasing. Author and Independent Journalist Dahr Jamail tells RT that U.S. soldiers in combat zones find themselves being terrorist.

one way palestinians and indigenous americans are alike is the long history of political imprisonment. it’s yet another means of separating people and destroying resistance recently leonard peltier was denied parole yet again. last week his attorney, eric seitz, wrote about it for the san francisco bay view news while going over some details of the case and letting us know what we can do about it:

The Bush administration holdovers on the U.S. Parole Commission today adopted the position of the FBI that anyone who may be implicated in the killings of its agents should never be paroled and should be left to die in prison.

Despite judicial determinations that the unrepentant FBI fabricated evidence and presented perjured testimony in Leonard Peltier’s prosecution; despite a jury’s acquittal on grounds of self-defense of two co-defendants who were found to have engaged in the same conduct for which Mr. Peltier was convicted; despite Mr. Peltier’s exemplary record during his incarceration for more than 33 years and his clearly demonstrated eligibility for parole; despite letters and petitions calling for his release submitted by millions of people in this country and around the world including one of the judges who ruled on his earlier appeals; and despite his advanced age and deteriorating health, the Parole Commission today informed Mr. Peltier that his “release on parole would depreciate the seriousness of your offenses and would promote disrespect for the law” and set a reconsideration hearing in July 2024.

This is the extreme action of the same law enforcement community that brought us the indefinite imprisonment of suspected teenage terrorists, tortures and killings in CIA prisons around the world and widespread disrespect for the democratic concepts of justice upon which this country supposedly was founded. These are the same institutions that have never treated indigenous peoples with dignity or respect or accepted any responsibility for centuries of intolerance and abuse.

At his parole hearing on July 28, Leonard Peltier expressed regret and accepted responsibility for his role in the incident in which the two FBI agents and one Native American activist died as the result of a shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Mr. Peltier emphasized that the shootout occurred in circumstances where there literally was a war going on between corrupt tribal leaders, supported by the government, on the one hand, and Native American traditionalists and young activists on the other.

He again denied – as he as always denied – that he intended the death of anyone or that he fired the fatal shots that killed the two agents, and he reminded the hearing officer that one of his former co-defendants recently admitted to having fired the fatal shots himself.

Accordingly, it is not true that Leonard Peltier participated in “the execution style murders of two FBI agents,” as the Parole Commission asserts, and there never has been credible evidence of Mr. Peltier’s responsibility for the fatal shots, as the FBI continues to allege.

Moreover, given the corrupt practices of the FBI itself, it is entirely untrue that Leonard Peltier’s parole at this juncture will in any way “depreciate the seriousness” of his conduct and/or “promote disrespect for the law.”

We will continue to seek parole and clemency for Mr. Peltier and to eventually bring this prolonged injustice to a prompt and fair resolution.

Take action

News from North Dakota today is that Leonard Peltier’s parole has been denied. He won’t receive another full parole hearing until 2024, at the age of 79 years.

As sad as we all are, we are steadfast, undefeated. We will not go away. We will not be quiet.

Take a moment to reflect. Just a moment. But then put your disappointment behind you. Gather your strength. There’s much work to be done.

Action Item 1: Contact the Attorney General

On June 23, 1995, Amnesty International submitted a letter of concern about the Peltier case to the then U.S. Attorney General. There was no response. Write to Eric Holder, Attorney General. Ask him to conduct an executive review of the case and to finally right the wrongs of the past. Tell him it’s never too late to find the truth. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Write to Eric A. Holder, Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC 20530-0001, (202) 353-1555.

And while you’re at it, ask Mr. Holder why more than 140,000 documents from a more than 30-year-old case are still being withheld by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Tell him America has a right to know what occurred over 30 years ago and demand the release of all documents related to the Peltier case.

Action Item 2: Contact Members of Congress

Use all the resources at your disposal to contact your members of Congress and continue urging them to support freedom for Leonard Peltier. That support should be formally expressed in correspondence to President Obama.

Also demand a full congressional investigation into the Reign of Terror on the Pine Ridge Reservation during the ‘70s. It’s long past time for the truth to be told. See http://www.FreePeltierNow.org/call.htm and http://www.FreePeltierNow.org/write.htm.

Do you use Twitter? Try using this service to quickly and easily reach your members of Congress: http://tcxs.net/.

You also can sign the petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Pine_Ridge/.

Congress will not be in session for most of August. This is a good time to meet with your members of Congress in their home offices. Make the appointment now. You can find locations, telephone numbers etc. via our congressional directory: http://www.FreePeltierNow.org/congressmaster.htm.

Action Item 3: Call the White House

Call the White House comment line to express your outrage at the outcome of the parole hearing. Demand that President Obama free Peltier now. Call (202) 456-1111 or (202) 456-1112.

You also can send an e-mail to the White House. Go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.

If you prefer, mail or fax a letter: President Barack Obama, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, DC 20500, fax (202) 456-2461.

Better yet … do all three. It’s time to set him free … because it is the RIGHT thing to do.

“When you begin a great work you can’t expect to finish it all at once; therefore, you and your brothers [and sisters] press on and let nothing discourage you until you have entirely finished what you have begun.” – Teedyuschung, chief of 10 Delaware tribes, died in 1763

To learn more, visit Friends of Peltier at http://www.FreePeltierNow.org or email contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info. The Bay View thanks Freedom Archives, www.Freedomarchives.org, for compiling this information. Questions and comments may be sent to claude[at]freedomarchives.org.

recently, dahr jamail wrote a great article called “kill the indian. save the man” for truthout in which he offers a great historical overview of how the united states actively worked to destroy the indigenous. of course, one method was imprisonment, but yet another was cultural genocide, specifically destroying the relationship between american indian tribes and their languages:

Steven Newcomb, a Shawnee/Lenape Native American and author of “Pagans in the Promised Land – Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery,” has written: “It’s a little known fact that the Catholic Church issued a number of papal edicts in the fifteenth century that set into motion patterns of colonization that became globalized over many centuries. In the documents “Dum diversas” (1452) and “Romanus Pontifex” (1455), for example, issued by Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal, the pope “authorized” the king to send men to the Western Coast of Africa and “to invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue” all non-Christians, “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and to “take away all their possessions and property.” Such patterns of thought and behavior became institutionalized in law and policy, and the patterns are still operative against indigenous peoples today under the concept of “the State.”

An effective means to institutionalize this process was to indoctrinate Native American children at highly religious boarding schools run by the Department of Interior. The children were severed from their families on reservations with the ostensible aim of saving them from poverty.

The original boarding school idea came from Gen. Richard Henry Pratt who formed the Carlyle Indian School in Carlyle, Pennsylvania, in 1878. He wrote in “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260-271, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Systematically, his school and its later extensions stripped away tribal culture. Students were forced to drop their Native American names, barred from speaking in their native languages and forbidden to wear long hair. Punitive measures and torture were rampant.

Pratt’s conviction of moral superiority can be gathered from his views on slavery, “Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race – seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible – probable – citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.”

here is one way palestinians and indigenous americans are different: palestinians still have their language. although in 1948 palestine there are some serious barriers to arabic for palestinians, particularly given the way the education and exam system is set up so that there are only incentives for palestinians to become adept in hebrew and not in arabic in the same academic ways. but there are american indians who are actively working to resist all that jamail catalogs in the above-quoted article. al jazeera did a great piece about indigenous americans and language on rageh omaar’s program witness a month ago and it’s well worth watching. it’s directed by amy williams and it follows tish keahna who shows us how the wind river reservation has created an arapaho language immersion school to reverse the effects of centuries of killing indigenous languages:

Politically rambunctious hip-hop/jazz/indie ensemble Junkyard Empire set to perform with emcee, activist and 2009 National Poetry Slam 1st Place winner GUANTE at the Rebellion Politik CD Release Party on September 4th. Co-Sponsored by LiveWithSubstance.org

Junkyard Empire plans to blow the roof off of the Cedar Cultural Center on September 4 with hip-hop and spoken word poet extraordinaire, Tru Ruts/Speakeasy Records artist GUANTE, and internationally acclaimed independent war reporter, DAHR JAMAIL.  Guante and the St. Paul “Soap Boxing” poetry slam team recently finished first at the 2009 National Poetry Slam, beating out artists from Austin, NYC, Oakland, San Francisco, Albuquerque and elsewhere.  Guante’s success as a poet is reflected in his work as an emcee: every word counts, and stage presence is as much about creating a real connection with the audience as it is about jumping up and down and yelling.  City Pages, in their annual “Artists of the Year” feature, said: “Guante quietly rolled into the Twin Cities’ hip-hop and spoken-word scenes with a hand grenade, and pulled the pin. If you look anywhere in those scenes now, you’ll see his shrapnel buried deep in every wall.”

Headlining act Junkyard Empire shares a similar passion for lyrical content and successfully inspires its listeners to think critically about world affairs and question mainstream media’s impression of international politics.  Trombonist and band founder Christopher Cox discussed in a recent interview with Political Affairs Magazine that Junkyard Empire wishes to provide “the soundtrack for political protest,” commenting that all necessary change needs to come from a grassroots level in various communities.  Vocalist Brihanu elaborated that the music “is just the icing on the cake” implying that its message and organizing power is where much of the splendor lies.

Don’t miss this extraordinary event as Junkyard Empire continues to unite music and politics and Guante thrills the crowd with the ferocity of his stage presence.  It will be a night of impeccable musical performance and fascinating world assessment that is sure to turn heads and enlighten minds.

Junkyard Empire CD Release Party featuring Guante, Carnage the Executioner, Samosa and Dahr Jamail. Co-sponsored by LiveWithSubstance.org. 7:00pm. All Ages. $10 in advance; $12 at the door. Cedar Cultural Center, 416 Cedar Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN.

Jon Letman | Inter Press Service, Aug 18, 2009

KAUAI, Hawaii, 17 Aug (IPS) – Six months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the U.S. public’s display of antiwar sentiment has faded to barely a whisper.

Despite Obama’s vow to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq before September 2011, he plans to leave up to 50,000 troops in “training and advisory” roles. Meanwhile, nearly 130,000 troops remain in that country and more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers occupy Afghanistan, with up to an additional 18,000 approved for deployment this year.

So where is the resistance?

Continues >>

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

- George Orwell

On July 4 in Baghdad, Vice President Joe Biden, who campaigned with Barack Obama on a platform of ending the occupation of Iraq, found himself in one of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s lavish buildings, the Al-Faw Palace. While one of Saddam Hussein’s thrones sat on the side of the room, Biden presided over a swearing-in ceremony for 237 soldiers, who were becoming US citizens. Speaking of the ceremony, Biden said, “We did it in Saddam’s palace, and I can think of nothing better. That S.O.B. is rolling over in his grave right now.” Perhaps the irony of both the scene and his statement were lost to Biden. For if Saddam Hussein was rolling in his grave, the reason would have less to do with one of his palaces being used as a naturalization center for US soldiers, and more to do with the fact that the US government has no intention of withdrawing from Iraq anytime soon.

	While military commanders claim to have handed over 142 military outposts around Iraq to the Iraqis, US troops will continue to occupy 320 other outposts around Iraq.

We have passed the June 30 deadline that, according to a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on November 17, 2008, was the date all US forces were to have been withdrawn from all of Iraq’s cities. Today, however, there are at least 134,000 US soldiers in Iraq – a number barely lower than the number that were there in 2003. In addition, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates testified on June 9 that the United States would maintain an average of at least 100,000 troops in Iraq through fiscal year 2010.

The SOFA is a sieve, and the number of US military personnel in Iraq is remaining largely intact for now. Add to the 134,000 US soldiers almost the exact number of military contractors (132,610 and increasing), 36,061 of which, according to a recent Department of Defense report, are US citizens.

While the military and most corporate media would like you to believe that from now on no US soldiers will step foot in Iraqi cities, US military patrols in them are ongoing and will continue.

In addition, there has been an assumption that all US military bases within Iraqi city limits would be moved. For example, US Army Forward Operating Base Falcon, home to 3,000 US troops, is clearly within the city limits of Baghdad. But US military officials, working with Iraqis in the US-supported Iraqi government, have other ideas. “We and the Iraqis decided it wasn’t in the city,” a military official told the Christian Science Monitor. Thus, city lines are redrawn, to the convenience of the US military, to render certain bases and forward operating bases “outside” of Iraqi cities.

While military commanders claim to have handed over 142 military outposts around Iraq to the Iraqis, US troops will continue to occupy 320 other outposts around Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Democratically controlled Congress just passed a war-spending bill that allocated over $100 billion more for the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military (and military contractors) in Iraq is busily expanding and augmenting new bases in rural areas of Iraq. In fact, they are even building new bases in Iraq.

Furthermore, at least 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq until at least the end of 2011, despite the fact that, according to the SOFA, all US “combat” forces will leave Iraq by December 31, 2011.

A July 30 referendum vote on the SOFA is scheduled to take place in Iraq. Despite attempts by the Obama administration to postpone the referendum, it appears as though the vote will take place. Considering the fact that according to recent polls, 73 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US forces, the referendum, if legitimate, will put the Obama administrations long-term plans for Iraq in jeopardy as the vote could force US forces out of Iraq as they would no longer be under the legal “protection” of the SOFA.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
• 

Although we can only speculate as to whether the referendum will actually reflect the will of the Iraqi people, there will be one of two outcomes:

1. Due to Kurdish and Sunni opposition to the withdrawal of US forces, Maliki postpones the referendum. The US, which is also interested in maintaining the SOFA, supports Maliki in the delay they (Obama administration) have previously pushed for.

2. The Maliki regime overcomes this opposition and does not interfere with the carrying out of the vote or the results of the referendum, which will most likely reflect the will of the Iraqi people to have US forces withdraw from Iraq completely. This would mean the Maliki regime does not want US forces to remain in Iraq, feels strong enough to finally stand on its own and is prepared to settle scores with the formerly US-backed Sahwa forces (Sunni militia), to establish absolute control in Baghdad.

Regardless of the outcome, it is clear that Iraq is further down the road of Balkanization, a plan that Biden has supported for years -to have Iraq split into three rump states. There is already evidence for this – for as Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have been forced to return home due to funding to support them having been cut due to the Maliki regime pressuring hosting countries, as well as the UN, to have them return. Those returning have been unable to return to their homes. Instead, they are being forced to relocate to either Sunni or Shia areas. Moreover, the Iraqi government has been making no effort to help them return to their original homes, which indicates the Maliki regime is interested in supporting the Balkanization of Iraq.

Nevertheless, again we find the US policy of long-term, indefinite occupation of Iraq to be at loggerheads with the will of the vast majority of the Iraqi people.

From June 28 to July 5, at least 82 Iraqis were killed and 225 wounded, which amounts to another typical week of US occupation of their country. Let us watch how the Obama administration reacts to the referendum at the end of this month, since President Obama is clearly not interested in withdrawing from Iraq anymore than he is interested in a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/u-s-occupation-of-iraq-continues-unabated/

there is a new petition to sign for leonard peltier one of the oldest american indian political prisoners in the united states. here is the text of the petition as well as the link to sign it:

Convicted in connection with the deaths on June 26, 1975, of Ronald Williams and Jack Coler, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Leonard Peltier remains imprisoned at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, despite proof that he was convicted on the basis of fabricated and suppressed evidence, as well as coerced testimony. In fact, the court record clearly shows that government prosecutors have long held that they do not know who killed Mr. Coler and Mr. Williams and, according to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals: “Much of the government’s behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed.” In spite of these facts, Mr. Peltier has served more than 30 years in prison.

After careful consideration of the facts in Mr. Peltier’s case, we have concluded that Leonard Peltier does not represent a risk to the public. First, Mr. Peltier has no prior convictions and has advocated for non-violence throughout his prison term. Furthermore, Mr. Peltier has been a model prisoner. He has received excellent evaluations from his work supervisors on a regular basis. He continues to mentor young Native prisoners, encouraging them to lead clean and sober lives. He has used his time productively, disciplining himself to be a talented painter and an expressive writer. Although Mr. Peltier maintains that he did not kill the agents, he has openly expressed remorse and sadness over their deaths.

Most admirably, Mr. Peltier contributes regular support to those in need. He donates his paintings to charities including battered women’s shelters, half way houses, alcohol and drug treatment programs, and Native American scholarship funds. He also coordinates an annual gift drive for the children of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — a successful program that, in 2006, expanded to include other reservations throughout the country.

Leonard Peltier is widely recognized in the human rights community for his good deeds and in turn has won several human rights awards including the North Star Frederick Douglas Award; Federation of Labour (Ontario, Canada) Humanist of the Year Award; Human Rights Commission of Spain International Human Rights Prize; and 2004 Silver Arrow Award for Lifetime Achievement. Mr. Peltier also has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize six times.

Mr. Peltier is now over 60 years of age — a great-grandfather — and suffers from partial blindness, diabetes, a heart condition, and high blood pressure.

Rather than presenting a threat to the public, Mr. Peltier’s release would help to heal a wound that has long impeded better relations between the federal government and American Indians.

Mr. Peltier deserves to be reunited with his family and allowed to live the remaining years of his life in peace.

We, the undersigned, support justice and human rights for all people of all nations; recognize that the U.S. courts, by their decisions, have recognized the undisputed misconduct in Peltier’s case, yet have failed to take corrective action; determine the U.S. government’s handling of the Peltier case as a clear abuse of the legal standards of American justice; and do hereby call for justice for Leonard Peltier in the form of an immediate grant of parole.

for those who want background information on peltier’s case the film incident at oglala offers some important context:

dahr jamail, famous for his unembedded reporting in iraq, has a new article aptly entitled “destroying indigenous populations” which is an important read for understanding the wider context of american colonialism at “home” and its imperial advances in iraq:

The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877.

Charmaine White Face, an Oglala Tetuwan who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation, is the spokesperson for the Teton Sioux Nation Treaty Council (TSNTC), established in 1893 to uphold the terms of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. She is also coordinator of the voluntary group, Defenders of the Black Hills, that works to preserve and protect the environment where they live.

“We call gold the metal which makes men crazy,” White Face told Truthout while in New York to attend the annual Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations in late May. “Knowing they could not conquer us like they wanted to … because when you are fighting for your life, or the life of your family, you will do anything you can … or fighting for someplace sacred like the Black Hills you will do whatever you can … so they had to put us in prisoner of war camps. I come from POW camp 344, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. We want our treaties upheld, we want our land back.”

Most of the Sioux’s land has been taken, and what remains has been laid waste by radioactive pollution.

“Nothing grows in these areas – nothing can grow. They are too radioactive,” White Face said.

Although the Black Hills and adjoining areas are sacred to the indigenous peoples and nations of the region, their attempts at reclamation are not based on religious claims but on the provisions of the Constitution. The occupation of indigenous land by the US government is in direct violation of its own law, according to White Face.

She references Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The spokesperson for the TSNTC declares, “We need our treaty upheld. We want it back. Without it we are disappearing. They might have made us into brown Americans who speak the English language and eat a different kind of food, and are not able to live with the buffalo like we are supposed to, but that is like a lion in a cage. You can feed it and it will reproduce, but it is only a real lion when it gets its freedom and can be who it’s supposed to be. That’s how we are. We are like that lion in a cage. We are not free right now. We need to be able to govern ourselves the way we did before.”

Delegations from the TSNTC began their efforts in the United Nations in 1984 after exhausting all strategies for solution within the United States.

Homeland Contamination

There is uranium all around the Black Hills, South and North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Mining companies came in and dug large holes through these lands to extract uranium in the 1950’s and 1960’s prior to any prohibitive regulations. Abandoned uranium mines in southwestern South Dakota number 142. In the Cave Hills area, another sacred place in South Dakota used for vision quests and burial sites, there are 89 abandoned uranium mines.

In an essay called “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” political activists Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke state that former US President Richard Nixon declared the 1868 Treaty Territory a “National Sacrifice Area,” implying that the territory, and its people, were being sacrificed to uranium and nuclear radiation.

The worst part, according to White Face, is that, “None of these abandoned mines have been marked. They never filled them up, they never capped them. There are no warning signs … nothing. The Forest Service even advertises the Picnic Springs Campground as a tourist place. It’s about a mile away from the Cave Hills uranium mines.”

The region is honeycombed with exploratory wells that have been dug as far down as six to eight hundred feet. In the southwestern Black Hills area, there are more than 4,000 uranium exploratory wells. On the Wyoming side of the Black Hills, there are 3,000 wells. Further north into North Dakota, there are more than a thousand wells.

The Black Hills and its surroundings are the recharge area for several major aquifers in the South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming regions. The crisis can be gauged from the simple description that White Face gives: “When the winds come, they pick up the [uranium] dust and carry it; when it rains or snows, it washes it down into the aquifers and groundwater. Much of this radioactive contamination then finds its way into the Missouri River.”

She informs us that twelve residents out of about 600 of the sparsely populated county of Cave Hills have developed brain tumors. A nuclear physicist has declared one mine in the area to be as radioactively “hot” as ground zero of Hiroshima.

Red Shirt, a village along the Cheyenne River on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, has had its water tested high for radiation and local animals have died after consuming fish from the river.

After three daughters of a family and their mother died of cancer, a family requested White Face to have the municipal water tested. The radiation levels were found to be equal to those inside an x-ray machine. Little wonder then that the surviving sons and their father are afflicted with the disease. People procuring their grain and cattle from the region are advised to be extra cautious.

One cannot but feel the desperation of her people when White Face bemoans, “It’s pure genocide for us. We are all dying from cancer. We are trying not to become extinct, not to let the Great Sioux Nation become extinct.”

The Ogala Sioux are engaged in ongoing legal battles with the pro-uranium state of South Dakota. They are aware of the unequal nature of their battle, but they cannot afford to give up. White Face explains how “… Our last court case was lost before learning that the judge was a former lawyer for one of the mining companies. Also, the governor’s sister and brother-in-law work for mining companies [Powertech] and a professor, hired by the Forest Service to test water run-off for contamination, is on contract with a company that works for the mining company. When I found out the judge was a lawyer for the mining company I knew we would lose, but we went ahead with the case for the publicity, because we have to keep waking people up.”

Other tribes, such as the Navajo and Hopi in New Mexico, have been exposed to radioactive material as well. Furthermore, the July 16, 1979, spill of 100 million gallons of radioactive water containing uranium tailings from a tailing pond into the north arm of the Rio Puerco, near the small town of Church Rock, New Mexico, also affected indigenous peoples in Arizona.

Her rage and grief are evident as White Face laments, “When we have our prayer gatherings we ask that no young people come to attend. If you want to have children don’t come to Cave Hills because it’s too radioactive.”

The exploitative approach to the planet’s resources and peoples that led to these environmental and health disasters collides with White Face’s values: “I always say that you have to learn to live with the earth, and not in domination of the earth.”

Nuking the Colonies

The US government practices another approach. In occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, the uranium that has caused genocide of sorts at home has proceeded to wreak new havoc.

Two Iraqi NGO’s, the Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI) and the Conservation Center of Environment and Reserves in Fallujah (CCERF) have extensively documented the effects of restricted weapons, such as depleted uranium (DU) munitions, against the people of Fallujah during two massive US military assaults on the city in 2004.

In March 2008, the NGO’s were to present a report titled “Prohibited Weapons Crisis: The effects of pollution on the public health in Fallujah” to the 7th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council

Muhammad al-Darraji, director, MHRI and president, CCERF, was to present the report with an appeal, “We are kindly asking the High Commissioner for Human Rights to look at the content of the report in accordance with the General Assembly’s resolution 48/ 141 (paragraph 4) of 20 December 1993, to investigate the serious threat (to the) health right in Fallujah and Iraq, and to relay the results of this investigation to the Commission on Human Rights to take the suitable decisions.”

Attached to the aforementioned is another report co-authored by Dr. Najim Askouri, a nuclear physicist trained in Britain and a leading Iraqi nuclear researcher and Dr. Assad al-Janabi, director of the Pathology Department at the 400-bed public hospital in Najaf. Their report includes a section on the “Depleted Uranium Crisis” from Najaf, 180 miles from where DU was used in the First Gulf War.

Dr. Najim begins the report by noting that Coalition Forces, mostly US, used 350 tons of DU weapons in about 45 days in 1991, primarily in the stretch of Iraq northwest of Kuwait where Iraqi troops were on their retreat. Then, in 2003, during the Shock and Awe bombing of Baghdad, the US used another 150 tons of DU. He says that cancer is spreading from the conflict area as a health epidemic and will only get worse. The cancer rate has more than tripled over the last 16 years in Najaf.

According to Dr. Najim, “When DU hits a target, it aerosolizes and oxidizes, forming a uranium oxide that is two parts UO3 and one part UO2. The first is water soluble and filters down into the water aquifers and also becomes part of the food chain as plants take up the UO3 dissolved in water. The UO2 is insoluble and settles as dust on the surface of the earth and is blown by the winds to other locations. As aerosolized dust, it can enter the lungs and begin to cause problems as it can cross cell walls and even impact the genetic system.”

One of Dr. Najim’s grandsons was born with congenital heart problems, Down Syndrome, an underdeveloped liver and leukemia. He believes that the problems are related to the child’s parents having been exposed to DU.

Detailing a skyrocketing rate of cancer and other pollution-related illnesses among the population of Fallujah since the two sieges, the report states, “Starting in 2004 when the political situation and devastation of the health care infrastructure were at their worst, there were 251 reported cases of cancer. By 2006, when the numbers more accurately reflected the real situation, that figure had risen to 688. Already in 2007, 801 cancer cases have been reported. Those figures portray an incidence rate of 28.21 [per 100,000] by 2006, even after screening out cases that came into the Najaf Hospital from outside the governorate, a number which contrasts with the normal rate of 8-12 cases of cancer per 100,000 people.

“Two observations are striking. One, there has been a dramatic increase in the cancers that are related to radiation exposure, especially the very rare soft tissue sarcoma and leukemia. Two, the age at which cancer begins in an individual has been dropping rapidly, with incidents of breast cancer at 16 (years of age), colon cancer at 8 (years of age), and liposarcoma at 1.5 years (of age).” Dr. Assad noted that 6 percent of the cancers reported occurred in the 11-20 age range and another 18 percent in ages 21-30.

“The importance of this information confirms there is a big disaster in this city…. The main civilian victims of most illnesses were the children, and the rate of them represents 72 percent of total illness cases of 2006, most of them between the ages of 1 month and 12 years…. Many new types and terrible amounts of illnesses started to appear [from] 2006 until now, such as Congenital Spinal cord abnormalities, Congenital Renal abnormalities, Septicemia, Meningitis, Thalassemia, as well as a significant number of undiagnosed cases at different ages. The speed of the appearance these signals of pollution after one year of military operations refers to the use of a great amount of prohibited weapons used in 2004 battles. The continued pollution maybe will lead to a genetic drift, starting to appear with many abnormalities in children, because the problems were related to exposure of the child’s parents to pollution sources and this may lead to more new abnormalities in the future. According to the security situation with many checkpoints and irregular cards to allow the civilians to enter or exit the city until now, all this helps to continue the terrible situation for this time. Therefore, we think that all these data is only 50 percent of the real numbers of illnesses.”

The Sioux tell their youth to avoid their radioactive native lands if they wish to procreate and prosper. Those in Iraq have no option but to lead maimed lives in their native land.

On February 4, 2009, Muhammad al-Darraji sent President Barack Obama a letter, along with the aforementioned report. A few excerpts are presented here:

“We have the honor to submit with this letter our report on the effects on public health of prohibited weapons used by the United States during its military operations in Fallujah (March-November 2004). It was our intention to present the report to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations on 4 March 2008, but both security and political reasons played a significant role in making this task impossible. The report, now in your hands, contains vast evidence and documentation on the catastrophic and continuous pollution in Iraq (to prevent) which nobody has taken any real action to help the victims or clean up polluted places. Some months ago, and in June 2008, I sent this report directly to some US congressmen. Two of them went to my town, Fallujah, and visited the general hospital to investigate the claims contained in our report. No substantial result came out of this visit. In February 2009 one of my colleagues, who worked in the hospital’s statistical office and helped gather information about the pollution, was killed by unknown individuals. The blood of my friend is the driving force that led me to write to you directly in order for you to release the facts for which my friend paid with his life. Therefore, we are kindly asking you to look at the content of the attached report and to investigate the serious threats to the right to life of the inhabitants of Fallujah and other polluted places in Iraq, as well as to publicly release the results of this investigation under right of information about what really happened in Iraq.”

The president has yet to respond.

———

Jason Coppola and Bhaswati Sengupta contributed to this article.

and there’s more. irin news published a timeline of violence in iraq that falls on obama’s watch–these are obama’s wars now and the blood is entirely on his hands:

Iraqi deaths have been caused by US-led forces, Iraqi forces, foreign insurgents, sectarian violence and indirectly by war-related effects on their health, on food security and sanitation. Estimates range from 100,000 to well over a million.

22 June 2009: A bomb in Husseiniya vegetable market on northern outskirts of Baghdad killed five. Parked car bomb in central Baghdad’s Karrada District killed five. Suicide bomber killed himself and seven others outside west Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib municipal council building.

20 June: A suicide truck bomb killed 73 and wounded about 150 others outside a mosque in Kirkuk, 250km north of Baghdad.

12 June: A gunman killed the head of parliament’s biggest Sunni Muslim bloc and five other people at a mosque in west Baghdad.

10 June: 33 killed and 70 wounded in a car bombing in the town of Batha, west of Nasiriyah in Dhiqar Province.

8 June: A bomb attached to a minibus killed seven people and wounded 24 others at a bus terminal in southern Baghdad.

3 June: 9 killed and 31 wounded by a bomb planted in a cafe in southwest Baghdad.

21 May: A suicide bomber killed 12 and wounded 25 in a market in Baghdad’s southern Doura District. Three US soldiers also killed in the attack. In Kirkuk, a suicide bomber killed seven people and wounded eight.

20 May: At least 41 people killed and 82 wounded in a car bombing in the Shula District of northwest Baghdad.

6 May: A truck bomb killed 10 people and wounded 37 others in a vegetable market in Doura District, southern Baghdad.

29 April: At least 51 killed and many more wounded in a twin car bomb attack in Baghdad’s Sadr City.

24 April: At least 55 killed, including 20 Iranian pilgrims, by two suicide bombers outside the Al-Kadhim Shia shrine in Baghdad.

23 April: A suicide bomber killed 56, mostly Iranian pilgrims, in a restaurant near Muqdadiyah town, 80km northeast of Baghdad. A woman suicide bomber also killed 28 in an attack on police in central Baghdad.

6 April: Car bombings in mainly Shia districts of Baghdad kill at least 34 people.

26 March: At least 20 killed by a car bomb near a Baghdad market.

23 March: At least 25 killed by a suicide bomber in Jalawla, northeast Baghdad.

10 March: A suicide bomber kills at least 33 tribal leaders and army officers outside the town hall in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

8 March: A suicide bomber killed 28 at a Baghdad police academy.

13 Feb: A female suicide bomber killed 35 pilgrims, mainly women and children, near central city of Hilla.

4 Jan: A female suicide bomber killed 35 pilgrims at a Baghdad religious procession.

2 Jan: At least 23 killed in a suicide attack in Yussufiyah, south of Baghdad.

and the escalation of the massacring in pakistan is entirely obama’s war. today obama’s bombs fell on pakistanis attending a funeral for another massacre perpetrated by obama’s bombs the previous day:

At least 45 people have died in a missile strike by a US drone aircraft in Pakistan, officials there have said.

The people killed in South Waziristan region had been attending a funeral for others killed in a US drone strike earlier on Tuesday.

Intelligence officials said at least 45 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the later strike, when two missiles were fired.

But a local official told BBC News the death toll was more than 50.

jeremy scahill contextualizes the savagery of these drone massacres:

Three days after his inauguration, on January 23, 2009, President Barack Obama ordered US predator drones to attack sites inside of Pakistan, reportedly killing 15 people. It was the first documented attack ordered by the new US Commander in Chief inside of Pakistan. Since that first Obama-authorized attack, the US has regularly bombed Pakistan, killing scores of civilians. The New York Times reported that the attacks were clear evidence Obama “is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy.” In the first 99 days of 2009, more than 150 people were reportedly killed in these drone attacks. The most recent documented attack was reportedly last Thursday in Waziristan. Since 2006, the US drone strikes have killed 687 people (as of April). That amounts to about 38 deaths a month just from drone attacks.

The use of these attack drones by Obama should not come as a surprise to anyone who followed his presidential campaign closely. As a candidate, Obama made clear that Pakistan’s sovereignty was subservient to US interests, saying he would attack with or without the approval of the Pakistani government. Obama said if the US had “actionable intelligence” that “high value” targets were in Pakistan, the US would attack. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, echoed those sentiments on the campaign trail and “did not rule out U.S. attacks inside Pakistan, citing the missile attacks her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, ordered against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. ‘If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured,’ she said.”

amazingly there are still muslims who think obama is great because he cited a few suras from the qur’an. but i maintain actions speak louder than words. you cannot claim to respect islam on the one hand and massacre muslims on the other.

ann’s recent post on pulse media reminded me of the beirut-based “never before campaign,” which is one of the most inspirational collectives i’ve seen recently. their videos are amazing and remind us of why resistance is so necessary. they have one new video and two more that must have slipped passed me in the last month or so. here are all three (and here are the others which i blogged about when they were first uploaded on to youtube click here and here).

these videos do such an excellent job of exposing zionist propaganda and revealing the reality on the ground for palestinians. they are really brilliant. and this is the sort of energy that beirut and the people i love there feed my soul. one of my dear friends, rami, often keeps me grounded when we talk about the anti-colonial struggle in this region. these are some words he sent me a few months ago that i return to when i want to be reminded of this struggle in larger terms:

1. We know we are right because we read the facts objectively and dispassionately

2. We also know that the road is long and arduous and that the struggle is difficult

3. We also know that we-I mean our class- are irrelevant, and that the real struggle is between the rulers and the ruled

4. We know which side we are on.

And this is what gives us the desire to wake up, what makes our souls tremble, what replaces food and water and sleep. As for the others, the Mitchells, the Obamas, we should NEVER expect anything from them. NEVER.

exactly. and this goes for those who support or put their faith in such people, too. because those people are part of the colonial/imperial regional problem in the first place. and this goes for those who continue to think that normalization with zionist colonist terrorists will somehow benefit palestinians. as the above videos make clear: there is no partner for so-called “peace.” even the other day when there was a so-called protest against the law criminalizing the commemoration of an nakba, only about 40 zionist colonists showed up. there was an equally abysmal number of americans protesting the “israel day parade” in new york city the other day as mondoweiss reported. in any case, i choose not to put my energy into collaborating with such people, i think there are bigger fish to fry.

but there are others who we can expect to continue this struggle and who are doing just that: palestinian refugees. rami almeghari recently published an interview in electronic intifada with abdullah al-hourani and here is what he had to say about continuing the struggle:

RA: As a veteran Palestinian politician and a refugee, what do you say to upcoming refugee generations?

AH: I would like to apologize to these generations because we failed to achieve any results after these prolonged years of the Nakba [catastrophe], but I would like to emphasize that we have succeeded to keep our people steadfast on their lands and persistent in seeking their inalienable rights. Also, we have succeeded in maintaining the Palestinian identity and convincing the international community that there is a Palestinian people and there are rights for this people, and we succeeded in gaining the recognition of more than 100 countries for our rights. Even though we have not achieved those rights we kept those rights alive. The next generations should continue the struggle and achieve what we have failed to realize.

of course, the struggle is not just about palestine. it is regional. and in iraq dahr jamail has been reporting on increasing iraqi resistance to american imperialism and occupation of their land, which is, tellingly, connected to the salaries of the sahwa, the u.s. method of coopting iraqis away from resistance:

At least 20 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq in May, the most since last September, along with more than 50 wounded. Iraqi casualties are, as usual – and in both categories – at least ten times that number.

Attacks against US forces are once again on the rise in places like Baghdad and Fallujah, where the Iraqi resistance was fiercest before so many of them joined the Sahwa (Sons of Iraq, also referred to as Awakening Councils), and began taking payments from the US military in exchange for halting attacks against the occupiers and agreeing to join the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq. In early April I wrote a column for this website that illustrated how ongoing Iraqi government and US military attacks against the Sahwa, coupled with broken promises of the Sahwa being incorporated into the government security apparatus or given civilian jobs, would likely lead to an exodus from the Sahwa and a return to the resistance.

Slowly, but surely, we are seeing that occur. While US liaison Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer has called this idea, along with the ongoing controversy from the Iraqi government – led by US-pawn Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki – not paying most of the Sahwa members, while continuing government arrests of and attacks on Sahwa members “overblown,” this does not change reality. Let us recall the telling words of the reporter Caud Cockburn, father of journalist Patrick Cockburn, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”

Not surprisingly, in direct contradiction to Kulmayer’s comment, the Sahwa have warned the Iraqi government not to disregard its commitments to the fighters as far as providing them jobs and payment. On May 28, the independent Saudi-owned United Kingdom-based newspaper, al-Hayat, reported:

“A number of the leaders of the awakening councils called on the Iraqi government to honor its commitments towards the members of the awakening councils by paying their salaries which are three months late. They warned that their fighters might rebel against the government if their demands for their financial rights continue to be disregarded which might have an adverse effect on the security situation. Sheikh Masari al-Dulaymi, one of the leaders of the council in Falahat al-Taji to the north of Baghdad, announced that the committee supervising the national reconciliation process warned the leaders of the councils in and around Baghdad that their salaries would be paid and that a form of cooperation will be agreed upon with the tribes to preserve the security in Baghdad.”

The paper added that al-Dulaymi also pointed out that many council fighters abandoned their duties in protecting their areas because of the delays in receiving their salaries, and “we don’t want the crisis to grow any worse because the council members already distrust government promises.” Al-Hayat also reported that Sheikh Khaled Yassine al-Janabi, a leader of the council in al-Latifiyah in southern Baghdad, warned that the “government’s disregard for the issue of the councils and their demands will have an adverse effect on the security situation.”

Simultaneously, the Iraqi Resistance, whose ranks are growing with disenfranchised Sahwa along with other Iraqis joining for the usual reasons: their countrymen and women being detained, tortured, and raped by occupation forces and their Iraqi collaborators, the destroyed infrastructure and the suffering that accompanies this, among a myriad of other reasons (like the fact that one in four Iraqis lives in poverty), are, at least verbally, preparing to resume full operations.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that a commander in the Iraqi Resistance, who is also a member of the currently besieged Sahwa, said, “If we hear from the Americans they are not capable of supporting us … within six hours we are going to establish our groups to fight against the corrupt government. There will be a war in Baghdad.”

indeed there is a lot to resist in iraq as jeremy scahill reports given the rise on mercenaries in iraq and in afghanistan:

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon, with Barack Obama as commander in chief, there has been a 23% increase in the number of “Private Security Contractors” working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009 and a 29% increase in Afghanistan, which “correlates to the build up of forces” in the country. These numbers relate explicitly to DoD security contractors. Companies like Blackwater and its successor Triple Canopy work on State Department contracts and it is unclear if these contractors are included in the over-all statistics. This means, the number of individual “security” contractors could be quite higher, as could the scope of their expansion.

Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a whopping 242,657 contractors working on these two US wars. These statistics come from two reports just released by Gary J. Motsek, the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Program Support): “Contractor Support of U.S. Operations in USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, and Afghanistan and “Operational Contract Support, ‘State of the Union.’”

a parallel american imperial project in the region is right here in the west bank of palestine under the command of american lieutenant general keith dayton who recently delivered a lecture at the washington institute in which he laid out the so-called security apparatus he is building in palestine:

The U.S. administration and Congress provided an additional $75 million last year, bringing to $161 million that the USSC has been able to invest in the future of peace between Israel and Palestinians through improved security. So what have we done? At the risk of boring you, we did it in four major areas. First: Train and equip. Although we work closely with the Presidential Guard even now, we have focused on transforming the Palestinian national security forces into a Palestinian gendarmerie—an organized police force or police units, as it were— to reinforce the work being done by the civilian police advised by the European Union.

The training is a four-month program at the Jordan International Police Training Center—we abbreviate it as JIPTC for short—outside of Amman. It features a U.S.-Jordanian police training cadre and a U.S.-developed curriculum that is heavy on human rights, proper use of force, riot control, and how to handle civil disturbances. The training is also focused on unit cohesion and leadership.

Now, you might ask, why Jordan? The answer is pretty simple. The Palestinians wanted to train in the region, but they wanted to be away from clan, family, and political influences. The Israelis trust the Jordanians, and the Jordanians were anxious to help. Our equipping is all nonlethal and it is fully coordinated with both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Make sure you understand that. We don’t provide anything to the Palestinians unless it has been thoroughly coordinated with the state of Israel and they agree to it. Sometimes this process drives me crazy—I had a lot more hair when I started—but nevertheless, we make it work.

We don’t give out any guns or bullets. The equipment ranges from vehicles to socks. We have also graduated, now, three battalions—an average of five hundred men each—from JIPTC and another battalion is currently in training.The graduates have also been extensively schooled by the Jordanians, who have really stepped up to this task, on loyalty to the Palestinian flag and the Palestinian people.

of course, it is clear from recent events in qalqilia this week that the palestinian police do have bullets. but dayton must remind us that only zionist terrorists are allowed to be supplied not just with bullets, but with cluster bombs, apache helicopters, f16s, and lots of other material to aid them in their massacres. but palestinians get socks. not bullets.

mel frykberg reported for ips on the incident of the american-zionist-palestinian collaborationist authority’s attack on two palestinian men in qalqilia, which, of course, can be considered the work of dayton’s so-called “training”:

A bloody gun battle broke out Sunday morning in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilia between a group of Hamas gunmen and security forces from the Fatah-affiliated Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PA had tried to arrest and flush out a group of Hamas gunmen who were hiding in a building in the northern city, just over an hour’s drive north-west of Ramallah.

The exchange of gunfire left two Hamas members and three PA police officers dead. The owner of the building where the Hamas fighters had taken refuge also succumbed to his wounds.

The PA placed Qalqilia under curfew as they searched for additional gunmen in the areas surrounding the building where the clash had taken place.

Palestinian security forces were put on a state of high alert with throngs of soldiers and jeeps surrounding PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s government compound, the Muqata, in Ramallah.

Each side blamed the other for instigating the violence. According to the PA, the Hamas men had refused to surrender or identify themselves, and had opened fire on PA forces first.

However, Hamas spokesmen said the cornered men only returned fire after the PA men refused to back off.

indeed the palestinian information center rightly views this incident as a collaborationist one and highlights the severe, criminal problems of american military involvement in palestine:

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri stated Sunday that the assassination of two Qassam fighters in Qalqiliya is a translation of earlier remarks made by former PA chief Mahmoud Abbas in Washington about his commitment to the roadmap plan that criminalizes the resistance against the Israeli occupation.

In a statement to the Aqsa satellite channel, spokesman Abu Zuhri charged that Abbas’s security apparatuses try to repeat the Gaza experience in the West Bank, highlighting that his Movement would study its options for dealing with this crime.

For its part, the Palestinian government headed by premier Ismail Haneyya held Abbas fully responsible for the consequences of the Qalqiliya crime, considering that the assassination of Qassam fighters Mohamed Al-Samman and Mohamed Yassin is natural extension of the crimes committed by the PA security apparatuses against the Palestinian resistance in Al-Khalil.

The PLC’s presidency also held Abbas as well as his unconstitutional government and security leaders responsible for the repercussions of this “heinous crime”, stressing that it is high treason against the Palestinian people and a stab at the back of the Arab and Muslim nation.

In a statement received by the PIC, the PLC warned that this crime which was committed at the behest of Abbas and US officer Keith Dayton cannot be tolerated or goes without punishment.

it is this collaborationist regime that is leading some palestinians to call for dual resistance against the zionist entity and its collaborating palestinian authority partners:

A Palestinian civilian and five security officials – three from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority security services and two from Hamas’ military wing – were killed in clashes between the two groups in this West Bank city Sunday, as Damascus-based Hamas spokesman Talal Nasser called on Palestinians to fight the PA as though they were fighting the Israeli occupation.

Ismail Radwan, a top Hamas official in Gaza, called on members of the Hamas military wing in the West Bank not to surrender to PA forces and to defend themselves against the aggression of the security services.

Colonizing Culture
Wednesday 27 May 2009
by: Dahr Jamail, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

“An Iraqi boy walks down a street in southern Baqouba, surrounded by US Army soldiers. (Photo: Marko Drobnjakovic / AP)

Transgress

The geo-strategic expansion of the American empire is an accepted fact of contemporary history. I have been writing in these columns about the impact of the US occupation on the people of Iraq in the wake of the “hard” colonization via F-16s, tanks, 2,000-pound bombs, white phosphorous and cluster bombs.

Here I offer a brief glimpse into the less obvious but far more insidious phenomenon of “soft” colonization. That scholars and political thinkers have talked at length of such processes only establishes the uncomfortable reality that history is bound to repeat itself in all its ugliness, unless the human civilization makes a concerted effort to eliminate the use of brute force from human affairs.

Gandhi, the apostle of non-violent resistance said:

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.”
This is an idea rendered irrelevant in the current scenario, where the mightier among the world’s nations have secured the mandate to invade, with impunity, any society and any state that can be exploited for resources. Unlike earlier times, modern-day invasions are invariably camouflaged by a façade of elaborate deceit that claims altruistic intent as the motive of assault. In this new scheme of things, resistance is deemed as insurgency and dissent is unpatriotic. Those that are invaded do not have the luxury to decide between being beggar and slave. Culture would be the last thing on their minds as they struggle to stay alive. Yet it is the loss of their culture that ultimately causes the disintegration of these societies to the absolute advantage of their victors.

It is said that history is written by the victor. What is not said is that destroying the enemy is only half the purpose of a victor. The other half is the subjugation and drastic alteration of the self-perception of the enemy, so as to gain unquestioned control over every aspect of the subjugated state, its populace and its resources, so that having won victory it can get on with the “much bigger business of plunder,” according to Franz Fanon, philosopher, psychiatrist, author and a pre-eminent thinker of the twentieth century.

At one level we have the Human Terrain System (HTS) I have written about previously wherein social scientists are embedded with combat units, ostensibly to help the occupiers better understand the cultures they are occupying. The veiled intent is to exploit existing schisms and fault-lines in these societies to the occupier’s own advantage through the policy of divide and conquer.

As Edward Said stated in “Orientalism”:

“… there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge – if that is what it is – that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion.”
It is extremely obvious that the HTS belongs to this second category.

At another unquestioned level, the “democratization” and “modernization” of a “barbaric” society goes on. The embedded scholars of HTS evidently find no evidence of these cultures having withstood decades of international isolation and assault, yet sustained their sovereignty by the sheer dint of their education, culture and a well-integrated diverse social fabric. So the US sets up a range of state-funded programs, ostensibly to empower the women and youth of the target society, in the ways of democracy and modern civilization. Whether or not that suspect goal is accomplished, the badgered collective consciousness of the invaded people, traumatized by loss and conflict, does begin to submit to the “norms” of behavior prescribed by the victor, even when they are in violation of actual norms of society that may have prevailed prior to invasion.

Transform

Fanon said:

“A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion.”
Describing the psychopathology of colonization he said, “Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his ‘nation’, and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.”
Fanon’s speech to the Congress of Black African Writers in 1959 is an uncanny description of Iraq’s tragedy today:

“Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women …
“For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies.”
At times we may witness blatant violations as in the distribution of backpacks with US flags to Iraqi children.

A more repulsive example is the Skin White Serum. One of many companies engaged in selling skin-bleaching cream is Skin White Research Labs. They proudly sell Skin White Serum in “over 30 countries.” There are countless other companies involved in this market, selling similar products, like Skin White Bleaching Cream and Xtreme White.

The hidden message here is that, politically, those in the culture being colonized should seek to cover their brown skin, which is in fact part of their ethnic identity, and aspire to the culture, power and influence of the dominant culture at the expense of their own.

Somewhat less subtle is the corporate colonization of Iraq’s culture. An example of this is Iraqi girls carrying Barbie backpacks in the Sadr City area of Baghdad.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the dominant culture for a while now has been the US military. Since it has all the firepower and the brute force, it sets the norms and the standard. This is done by repeated suggestions through propaganda, and advertisements suggesting that the local population is of lesser worth than the occupiers of their country in their appearance, their beliefs, their customs and their way of life.

The material practices of society sustain its culture, which is the lifeline of identity, and affirmation that the progress of a nation depends on. Social custom, production systems, education, art and architecture are a few of the visible pillars of culture.

Community and custom become the first casualties when an entire people, unequal in the face of military might, struggle to survive under perpetual fear of loss and death. In a state of vacuum, the threatened society will grasp whatever is offered by the occupier as a “better” way of living. In the process it is bound to lose its own tried and tested self-sustaining modes of living.

With the destruction of infrastructure, education, health and livelihood sources are destroyed. When rehabilitation and restoration come packaged in alien systems of knowledge (read-USAID), that, too, is accepted in the absence of what existed earlier.

Literature, art and architecture meet with more systemic demolition.

My artist friends in Baghdad have reported,

“The occupation forces encouraged the rebels to loot museum and libraries. Five thousand years of history and art were irretrievably lost in hours. It is a loss for the world, not Iraq alone. Buildings can be fixed, so can electricity, but where can I find another Khalid al-Rahal to make me a new statue for Abu Fafar al-Mansoor? How will I replace the artifacts dating back to thousands of years? Iraq is altered forever.”
I have heard from ordinary men and women in Iraq, “We need our art, because it connects us with what has brought us here, and reminds us of where we are headed.” Dr. Saad Eskander has been director general of whatever remains of Iraq’s National Archive and Library and he says, “This building was burned twice, and looted. We have lost sixty percent of our archival collections like maps, historical records and photographs. Twenty-five percent of our books were lost … It has crippled our culture, and culture reaches to the bottom of peoples’ hearts, whereas politics do not.”

It is not difficult to see that the extent of devastation caused by the invasion and occupation of Iraq goes beyond loss of life, livelihood and property. The historical and cultural roots of the nation have been destroyed.”

——————————————————————————–

Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,” (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for eight months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last four years.