Well, with the crisis getting worse by the hour, maybe it will sink into some very small brains that off shore drilling is just not a good idea if you want to preserve the environment. And with the recent mine explosion that killed 29 people, and the ongoing horrific practice of mountain destruction for coal, maybe some more people will wake up to the fact that using fossil fuel is VERY DIRTY. And so is nuclear power.
No one who is a conservative could support nuclear power. It requires heavy government subsidy and heavy government regulation. If someone says they support nuclear power, they are NOT A CONSERVATIVE.
The same is true of coal extraction and oil sands and offshore drilling. No one who is really a conservative would support these businesses who require heavy government oversight and heavy government bailout when the shit hits the fan. If they say they are a conservative, you will know THAT THEY ARE LYING.
I could use very single cuss word in the English language and not come close to the obscenity that is this oil leak.
This was in response to an email posted on a listserve I belong to - I don't have permission to print the original email, but it was pretty ugly.
The ancestors to those folks from Mexico lived on this land now called the USA for centuries before anyone from Europe or Africa showed up. So, who is the immigrant here?
And people in the peace movement - especially veterans for peace - have done things for returning veterans. There was once a home downtown run by some religious folks who took in homeless veterans. They came regularly to peace actions, but they were closed down by the city for violations of city regulations. The local vets for peace have collected furniture and household items to donate to other veterans, who were first getting a place to live. None of us are rich, and we are not in control of how our tax dollars are being spent either.
How do you feel about the new statues in front of City County plaza to honor veterans? That cost the taxpayers $450,000. I think the money could have been better used to help the homeless vets, but we got a memorial glorifying wars instead. They call it a veterans memorial. They only glorify the DEAD veterans, because they are the only veterans who are not causing any problems at all.
And while we are not doing nearly enough for our veterans, we are doing vastly, vastly, vastly more for them than for the innocent civilian victims of our useless wars.
Those who come here to the USA to work and provide for their families - and are willing to sleep 20 to an apartment to do so - are not your enemies. They are here because of trade policies that came from the US government that ruined economic opportunities in their own land. They just want to live, and see their children succeed instead of cry at night because they are hungry.
But those politicians who enacted those laws that created NAFTA and other hideous trade policies, and who started these useless wars of aggression and greed - THEY SURE WANT YOU TO HATE THE IMMIGRANTS. Because as long as you are busy doing that, you won't have time to get really informed and figure out what the real problem is - THE POLITICIANS AND THEIR POLICIES. And you won't have the inclination to do something about it.
Here is a letter I email via Friends Committee on National Legislation website:
I am opposed to imposing sanctions on Iran and I feel the actions and words of US politicians around this issue are as insane as the actions and words around Iraq back in 2002.
In short, talking about sanctions and imposing sanctions is a war-making activity. And Iran (unlike the USA) has not invaded or attacked or occupied ANY other country. They are, at this time, in compliance with the Non Proliferation Treaty.
Sanctions will only hurt the ordinary people of Iran, just like sanctions only hurt the ordinary people of Iraq. It will make the current government of Iran stronger, just like it did to Saddam's government.
To even suggest such an action, as Obama and Clinton have done, is either insane or vastly evil..... or maybe both.
To follow through will only establish for the world that the US has no consideration for human rights - YET AGAIN. To follow through will only establish that the US's thirst for war mongering is not been abated at all.
It is insane, immoral and very stupid.
The photo came from facebook and is by Dexter Thompson Witherington. It is a sunset, and I thought it was very pretty.
Some new reactions to the WikiLeaks video, where a US gunship is shooting at Iraqis in Baghdad in July 2007. Two Reuter’s employees were among the people killed. A man who stopped to help the injured was also killed, and his two children were seriously injured, but survived.
The United States should hold comprehensive, impartial and public inquiries into the deaths of 16 journalists and three media support workers killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, a media lobby group said on Monday. In a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said thorough investigations into the deaths were needed to ensure lessons were integrated into future military and media training.
One thing they point out is how the US troops will sometimes mistake a camera for a weapon. This happened in the WikiLeaks video, but it happened in other situations too. They are basically interested in learning from this incident, so that these mistakes won’t happen again.
She knows the area where it happened, and has relatives that still live nearby. She played there as a child. At first, she feels numb watching the video, then she feels deep anger. She brings up other well known massacres that happened in Iraq since the US invasion. She ends with this statement:
We seldom hear from people like the Iraqi widow whose husband was shot, who looked me in the eye last summer, and said: "But we didn't invade their country." Unlike this video, the injustice she feels will not fade with time. It is engraved in the collective memory of people, and will be until justice is done.
Well, she is not exactly correct in that last assessment. Her opinion piece was published on April 10, 2010. According to an article published on April 26, 2010, the widow of the man who was driving the van (and the mother of the two children injured) has accepted the apology that two US troops wrote to Iraqis concerning this incident. A post on that apology is here.
The widow of an Iraqi killed in a notorious US helicopter attack yesterday accepted an apology from two of the soldiers involved. The two wrote an open letter after footage of the 2007 incident was leaked on the internet. Ahlam Abdelhussein Tuman, 33, told The Times that she forgave Ethan McCord and Josh Stieber, who wrote “we acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones”, because Mr McCord had also rescued her children: Duaa, 7, and Sajad, 13.
Since this incident happened in July 2007, the children were younger then. They have scars on their bodies from the attack. Their mother said:
“I can accept their apology,” Mrs Tuman said, “because they saved my children and if it were not for them, maybe my two little children would be dead.”
She also commented that the anti-war work the two soldiers are doing is very good work, because she would like the American people to understand what happened here in Iraq. She states:
“We lost our country and our lives were destroyed.”
She also asked for financial help, since their breadwinner was killed and the children’s medical expenses are running into the thousands of dollars. The mother and her children had to leave their home and move in with their brother in law.
One of the families of the Reuter’s employees was less forgiving. The father of Nabil Noor-Eldeen said that he was angry the soldiers did not come forward sooner, and he wanted them to expose the rest of the crimes that happened against the Iraqis. His words:
If the two wished for forgiveness, he said, “they should expose the rest of the crimes that have happened against the Iraqis, and not wait for another film to ask for apology and forgiveness”.
The other family (of Saeed Chmagh) accepted the apology. His brother said:
“I thank them for their good feelings,” he said, calling for the two men to testify to “the injustice that happened in front of them” in international courts.
Reuters, at this time, will not comment on whether it will be pursing legal action around the death of their two employees.
I remember when this incident happened, since I regularly look at the photos coming out of Iraq. I had seen the work of Nabil Noor-Eldeen. It was the pictures from the funeral of Saeed Chmagh that really touched me though – he must have been a great man to have been so well loved, especially by his teenage son who was totally distraught by the death of his father.
This is supposed to be a report from an author writing about a war, but I am sure this author is clueless and probably evil too. Here is the comment I left for NPR (I used nice language, since cussing at them will mean the comment is not published - but they deserved a few cuss words for allowing this comment to go unchallenged):
I was appalled when I heard the comment “we got sucked into something that actually has turned out OK”. There are two grievous lies here: “we” did not get sucked into anything….we went ahead with a war of aggression against a country that never threatened or attacked us. And anyone with any brains could figure out in 2002 that there were no WMDs there, so anyone who said there were is either a liar or dumb as a rock.
And then there is the Iraq “turned out OK”. That is a totally sickening comment – there are now seven million Iraqis who are either dead, injured, or homeless. There are millions who are widows or orphans. A widow of one of the men killed in the WikiLeaks video said “We lost our country and our lives were destroyed.”
I do not understand how NPR can have people on your program and allow them to say such stupid comments and not challenge them. I wish you could explain yourself.
President Obama and his lovely wife, and about a dozen cars and trucks and small buses filled with who-knows-who, came to Asheville today. I was standing on Charlotte Street when he first went to Grove Park Inn, and was holding this sign plus a banner that said "Honor the image of God: Stop Torture Now". It turns out Obama and company left the Inn and went for a hike on the Blue Ridge Parkway a short while later, but I and my friends had left by that time. No one was taking pictures of me while I was standing there, unlike when I was holding the very same sign for Bush back in 2003. Of course, this time around, the President could actually read the sign himself. The above picture was taken after 5 PM, after the Obama group had passed this intersection on the way back to the Grove Park Inn. This is a picture of me holding the sign in the same spot as when the group passed. I did not want to get any closer since the guys in the dark SUVs were looking at me funny and making me nervous. But I am sure that Obama had a chance to read the sign and see the other protesters out there this fine spring evening. Below are some pictures of them.
We need to significantly reduce their carbon footprint.
Also, getting on airplanes in general needs to be greatly reduced - they leave a huge carbon footprint. The photo above is from the recent volcano eruption in Iceland, which grounded quite a few planes. That is an amazing photo, no?
Ethan McCord had just returned from dropping his children at school earlier this month, when he turned on the TV news to see grainy black-and-white video footage of a soldier running from a bombed-out van with a child in his arms. It was a scene that had played repeatedly in his mind the last three years, and he knew exactly who the soldier was.
McCord was the medic who carried the children to medical help. He is seen running with a child in his arms on the video. He was also one of the authors of the apology letter.
He discusses how badly injured the Iraqis were from the gunship fire, and how he found the children - he heard the cries of the little girl. He thought the boy was beyond help until he saw and heard him take a breath. As he ran with the boy he said "don't die, don't die" to him. He talks about how this day impacted him, in particular the injured children.
So, the first thing I did was grab the girl. I grabbed the medic and we went into the back. There’s houses behind where the van was. We took her in there and we’re checking to see if there were any other wounds. You can hear the medic saying on the video, "There’s nothing I can do here, she needs to be evac’d." He runs the girl to the Bradley. I went back outside to the van, and that’s when the boy took, like, a labored, breath. That’s when I started screaming, "The boy’s alive! The boy’s alive!" And I picked him up and started running with him over to the Bradley. He opened his eyes when I was carrying him. I just kept telling him, "Don’t die; don’t die." He looked at me, then his eyes rolled back into this head.
Then I got yelled at by my platoon leader that I needed to stop trying to save these mf’n kids and go pull security... I was told to go pull security on a rooftop. When we were on that roof, we were still taking fire. There were some people taking pot shots, sniper shots, at us on the rooftop. We were probably there on the roof for another four to five hours.
He talks about his agony over the children, and reports what his sergeant said.
So I went to a sergeant and asked to see [the mental health person], because I was having a hard time dealing with it. I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a lot of other horrible things. I was also told that there would be repercussions if I was to go to mental health.
Pretty atrocious.
He also reveals the fact that the Iraqis on the ground who were killed did have weapons, but he did not think they were part of the earlier fight.
Wired.com: Wikileaks presented the incident as though there was no engagement from insurgents. But you guys did have a firefight a couple of blocks away. Was it reasonable for the Apache soldiers to think that maybe the people they attacked were part of that insurgent firefight?
McCord: I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. However, when I did come up on the scene, there was an RPG as well as AK-47s there... You just don’t walk around with an RPG in Iraq, especially three blocks away from a firefight...
I believe him. There were weapons there.
McCord basically feels the troops in the gunship were following the ROE in the first attack, but he does not agree that they were doing so when they fired on the van. As his letter of apology shows, he realizes that the US was the ones to bring the fight to the streets of Iraq, and that it was wrong to do so.
Al Jazeera also did a report of the WikiLeaks video and interviewed the guy from WikiLeaks and someone else to interpret what was going on in the video. They further report on the shooting of hellfire missiles into a building a bit later on - and they report that the injured children have been given some compensation since the release of the WikiLeaks video. The al Jazeera video is below.
Two soldiers who are connected to the US Army company that shot and killed two Reuters employees and about a dozen other Iraqis in July 2007 have publicly apologized.
The WikiLeaks video was released on April 5, 2010. It shows about a dozen Iraqi men casually walking around in some back streets of Baghdad. A couple of the men MAY have been carrying AK 47s, but that has not been established. The US troops in the gunship believed they saw RPGs, but what they actually saw was photographic equipment belonging to the Reuters employee. The US gunship shot at and killed them all.
This WikiLeaks video was released anonymously by someone in the US military.
But this blog post is not about the original incident, or the release of information about the incident.
This is about two men who were members of the same company that participated in this attack, and have now made a public apology. One of the men, Ethan McCord, actually carried the children who were injured in the attack to medical help.
To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones during the July 2007 Baghdad shootings depicted in the "Collateral Murder" Wikileaks video:
We write to you, your family, and your community with awareness that our words and actions can never restore your losses.
We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Josh Stieber was in the same company but was not there that day, though he contributed to the your pain, and the pain of your community on many other occasions.
They go on to state that what was done cannot be undone. But they also recognize that saying “this was wrong” and saying that they are sorry CAN help heal some wounds. They also acknowledge what happened in this video was an everyday occurrence in Iraq, and they acknowledge that the Iraqi people have paid a hell of a price because of the US war to rid them of imaginary WMDs.
We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and carried out in the name of "god and country". The soldier in video said that your husband shouldn't have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.
Yes, these people in the video who were killed, and the children who were injured (and still suffer today from these actions), did nothing to hurt Americans. They did not attack us, and they did not threaten us, and they had no means to attack us in our homeland. Of course, with all the pain and hurt we have visited on them, they may one day decide to extract some revenge. It is unlikely they will get to the really guilty parties, that is our politicians who voted for and supported this war, but then all adult Americans have some responsibility in this massive war of aggression, the most evil of crimes. The responsibility only minimally lies with the US Army – they were following the ROE and doing what they were told. I wish they had made other choices, but the point of our military is to:
KILL OUR ENEMY AND BREAK THEIR SHIT
And to expect anything else out of our military is ridiculous. It would be like expecting teachers not to teach or garbage collectors not to pick up garbage. The problem with Iraq – and Afghanistan – and every other place our troops have been sent since 1950 is that we are attacking people WHO ARE NOT OUR ENEMY.
And therefore, we end up killing innocents.
The US soldiers finish with this:
With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. Please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care, and our dedication to change from the inside out. We are doing what we can to speak out against the wars and military policies responsible for what happened to you and your loved ones. Our hearts are open to hearing how we can take any steps to support you through the pain that we have caused. Solemnly and Sincerely,
Josh Stieber, former specialist, U.S. Army
Ethan McCord, former specialist, U.S. Army
These two men, and the anonymous man or woman who released this video to WikiLeaks, have my deepest respect and admiration.
I signed it. I signed it gladly. I think we need more of this – our military sharing what has happened in Iraq and expressing their concerns. What we need less of is glorifying dead combatants who have not expressed any remorse or regrets. We need more of glorifying those military personnel who speak out and those who refuse the orders to occupy or attack those who are not our enemy.
The Iraqi people were never our enemy. Neither are the Afghan people.
