ANIMAL FORUM

The Liars and New Empire Builders At Work.
The-Informer.
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http://www.rense.com/general40/bringthemhome.htm

Bring Our Soldiers Home
8-22-03

Dear Friends,

The growing movement to end Iraqs agony and bring the troops home is now
being led by the wives and mothers of serving US soldiers, who have grown
even more vocal after being ordered to cease and desist. Even as the neocons
prepare for a war against North Korea before the end of this year, its
becoming
hard to ignore and impossible to dismiss the patriotic anger of these
impassioned
women over an illegal war - or their pleas to bring the troops home now,
and let
the UN assist Iraq. Whats really happening in Ira What arent we being
told by a cowardly and complicit US media?

What is the situation in Baghdad from the GIs perspective? And most
importantly,who are the people and what are their personal stories behind
the grim and mounting statistics of Iraqi civilian casaulties? For the
children are always innocent and never deserve to die.

The following story contains occassional graphic language. It could not have
been compiled without the eyewitness accounts of some very brave reporters,
and a
handful of American soldiers unafraid to speak out - whose uncensored
comments
and reports are quoted and paraphrased here. Laugh often. Never pass up an
opportunity to express gratitude, be peaceful, or commit a random act of
kindness. Each time you think and act positively, you help change the vibe.

-- William Thomas

In Country

By William Thomas

Senior Correspondent
Lifeboatnews.com
8-22-3


They told you, you would be welcomed by a grateful people. They said you
would be protecting your homeland from weapons of mass terror. Your
superiors offered payback, a chance to smash al Qaeda and get the bastard
responsible for Sept. 11, before he could carry out even more fiendish
biological or radiological attacks against Americans. Most of all, they
promised that the quickest way home was through Baghdad.

All lies.

In a country awash in Kalashnikovs and blunderbuss-like rocket-grenades, you
cannot see or anticipate the enemy. A flame-spewing RPG or crude roadside
bomb can explode your life anywhere, anytime. The heat can be just as
deadly. Temperatures to 140 degrees, a water ration of two 1.5-liter bottles
a day, plus the 30 pounds of combat gear required to protect your life from
the people youve liberated is killing your buddies just as dead as an
automatic fired into a shopping soldiers ear. The whole thing is like some
nightmare out of the Wild West.

Except this time the Indians are winning.

You wanted to belong. You wanted direction in your life, and the Army seemed
to offer it. A paid-for university degree seemed a fair trade for a few
years of your young life. Until this.

* * *

Told not to expect contact until the outskirts of Baghdad, you crossed the
line of departure from Kuwait without any rounds in your weapons - so that
no one would get hurt. You wont see the enemy for quite sometime, your
C.O. said.

The fadeyeen must not have gotten the word. Springing ambushes as soon as
you crossed into Iraq, fierce desert fighters kept up withering crossfires
on a supply column that eventually stretched more than 400 miles along a
two-lane highway bordered by sand that clutched at boots and tires like
hands.

Pretending to run away, the attackers led pursuing GIs into prepared
killing zones, where more waiting guerillas cut those squads to pieces. In
one incident outside Maseriah, a film crew from al-Minar TV stumbled across
the bodies of about 40 U.S. soldiers strewn across the desert. When the
Lebanon TV network reported their find to American forces, a crew from a
responding U.S. chopper smashed their camera and recording equipment, and
told them to leave the area and say nothing of their finding.

What had happened was that as soon as Saddam started torching oil wells in
southern Iraq, Rumsfeld ordered an immediate attack before completing
preparatory air and artillery bombardments that have been standard military
assault doctrine since Guadalcanal and the Somme.

Thanks to the SECDEFs outstanding incompetence, the whole grand adventure
flipped into instant FUBAR. Except for hearing spooky sporadic transmissions
of ambushes and close-contact firefights, no one on that highway could
communicate with anyone beyond their own unit. Supply stiffs in thin-skinned
trucks, who werent supposed to see any fighting, found themselves under
recurring attack with no heavy weapons to defend themselves.

The road march up Ambush Alley was pure chaos. Iraqs talcum-like
dust -the finest in the Middle East - billowed up in brown outs that hid
tanks and Bradleys that did not stop for anything. Not even the hapless
Humvees and transport trucks squashed like bloody bugs in the Go! Go! Go!
race for Baghdad. Wanna-be warrior Rumsfeld and the chickenhawks around
him - who never worea uniform and never went to war - should be fired. Or
fragged. The White House remfs thought they could run a war and an
occupation on the cheap by contracting out crucial Army logistics to their
former corporate employers - vultures like Halliburtons Brown and Root, and
Bechtel.

But many contractors and their insurers turned out to be allergic to war
zones!
Combat units constantly running short of water and ammunition also had to
break into their five days emergency rations. You havent heard of any unit
receiving a single spare part during the entire battle.

Your own company had to abandon a dozen disabled vehicles and cram into
whatever still ran. Its hard to shoot straight from an overcrowded truck
cab, where a single RPG round could make a real mess.

Your unit made it to your objective. Others did not.

* * *

Allah be praised, Saddams generals sold out Baghdad without making a stand
that could have rivaled Stalingrad. But four months later, youre still in
country, still eating MREs. Which is to say, youre still eating shit while
crammed with 50 other smelly bodies in two frame tents near a pond full of
dead fish and mosquitoes.

Your colonel has his own room inside an air-conditioned trailer. Just like a
movie star, he sleeps on a king-size bed, flushes his own toilet, raids his
private refrigerator, and spends more time field-stripping his cappuccino
machine than his Colt. Preoccupied with promotion and similarly pressing
matters, it was two weeks before he came down to see how his troops were
living. But only after you went to the Corps. Surgeon over sanitation
concerns.

Baghdad is fucked. Slightly smaller than New York, the worlds first major
city has few tall buildings. Instead, the resulting sprawl is half-buried in
rubble from buildings bombed or burned by looters - block-long edifices
blackened and broken everywhere.

Desert heat, smoke from burning trash and smoldering ruins adds to the
chaos. Traffic lights are still not working as horse carts, motorcycles,
SUVs, tanks, Humvees and diesel-belching taxis and 1950s-era trucks all
careen both ways on one-way streets. Masses of sullen, angry or desperate
unemployed men part like the sea Mao mentioned, through which bandits,
insurgents and jihadists swim like sharks armed with handguns, grenades and
rage.

Hundreds, maybe thousands queue every day in crushing heat to apply for jobs
in the new Iraqi army. Whatever that is. Despite recent crackdowns on open
arms bazaars, just about every male in Iraq over the age of five already
seems to own an AK-47 or RPG.

Its strictly bring your own gun. But sending American troops to bust into
peoples homes in the dead of night, scaring the children, dishonoring
Muslim women in their nightclothes, and often stealing their jewelry and
savings before taking their men away for interrogation is producing more
enmity than hidden arms.

The July 27 raid was typical. A prominent tribal leader named Sheikh Rabia
Mohamed Habib was not even home when Task Force 20 stormed inside, killing a
guard. But the poorly trained and badly led troopers neglected to cordon off
every side street.

The first car to enter the neighborhood held at least two men. The second
contained two children around 10, their mother, and their father - crippled
in the eight-year U.S. proxy war with Iran. A hail of American automatic
weapons fire killed everyone in the second car.

Two more civilians were shot in a third car, which caught fire, cremating
its occupants. One American climbed into his Humvee, threw his helmet on the
floor, and shouted: Shit! Shit!

You later learned that two civilians in the first car were brought to the
Yarmouk Hospital - one gutshot, the other with his brain outside of his
head according to a doctor there. After receiving the grisly remains of
four of the dead, another physician started shouting at a reporter: If an
American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him.

* * *

So what are you supposed to do, turn the other cheek to a mortar round? When
you cant distinguish whos trying to kill you from whos not, the only way
to get through shit like this is to kill as many people as you can, people
you know are trying to kill you. Just keep pulling the trigger and get home.

No wonder that even though they themselves are mostly black or Latino, most
GIs call everyone here, sand niggers. Was Mandela right? Is this a race
war?

If only the nightmares would go away. Every time you collapse sweating into
your rack, another slide-show starts: maggots munching tongues, infants
heads on the ground, men with eyes and mouths wide open in heads cut halfway
off. You can still smell the torsos burning. From March 20 to April 7,
nothing but burned bodies, all the way to Baghdad.
With up to five KIA every day, many more Americans are getting shot and
blown up than the media back home is reporting. On July 15, someone fired a
shoulder-launched missile at a Herc coming into Baghdad airport. And three
more Americans were killed in a mortar attack and a roadside ambush.

You need to get out of here. You cant win against people who dont want you
in their country. And you cannot defend yourself against weakened,
demoralized attackers who wear civilian clothes, fire from crowds, and seem
to get stronger every day.

Instead, in what has become the ultimate Army betrayal, your entire
divisions scheduled deros home has been cancelled! Traumatized troopers
planning reunions with their spouses and families are being told they will
be in this hellhole for a year assisting their replacements in repelling
rising attacks - while your Commander-In-Chief puts down his golf clubs long
enough to taunt your suicidal assailants to bring em on.

Crotch shots on that carrier notwithstanding, the only thing that stands out
in the
Presidents military career is the fact that he never went near Vietnam, but
was AWOL for most of his final 18 months of Stateside military service in
72,73.
* * *

The great warrior was still nowhere in sight on August 7, when a Humvee
filled with grunts looking to buy porno DVDs pulled up in front of their
usual shop on al-Karada street. They were expected. When the
remote-controlled bomb buried in the median was detonated, the Humvees
gunner was cut in half. The driver was vaporized.

Angry over the Americans insult to Islam, their women and children and
Muslim shopkeepers too impoverished to refuse such immorality - locals
danced in the ashen hole that used to be the Hummer. Its burning flattened
frame sent a column of thick black smoke rising like an exclamation mark
beside even heavier smoke billowing from the Jordanian embassy, which had
also just been blown to hell, killing at least 11. Shouting enthusiastically
in Arabic, many people on Al-Karada Street kept repeating the word,
Saddam.
* * *


Three days later, more spooked soldiers opened fire on the Adel al-Kerim
family, killing the father and three of the children. Only the pregnant
mother and a 13-year-old daughter survived to tell how bullets riddled the
windshield, and how they screamed for the Americans to stop. We were
calling out to them, Stop, stop, we are a family Mrs. al-Kerim told a
British newsman. But they kept on shooting.

It was complete anarchy, says Ali al-Issawi. The Americans were firing at
each other.

Saad al-Azawi, the driver of a second car, was killed. His two passengers
were dragged from the wreck and beaten by American forces, while down the
street, Mrs. al-Kerim struggled from her own bullet-riddled sedan clutching
her wounded eight-year-old daughter, Mervet.

Seeking help from her brother, who lived nearby, the pregnant mother was
forced to leave her injured daughters -16-year-old Ia and 13-year-old
Haded - along with her groaning and badly bleeding husband in the car, and
the corpse of her 18-year-old son, Haider who had taken a round between his
eyes.

I saw my sister running towards me with her daughter in her arms and blood
pouring from her, recounts Mrs. al-Kerims brother. She was crying out,
Help, help, go and help Adel. I put them in my car and tried to drive to
the hospital. But the American soldiers pointed their guns at me and the
people shouted out to me Stop! Stop! They will shoot! They would not let
us go to the hospital.

That same day, Americas first unelected President declared in a radio
address back home: All Americans can be proud of what our military and
provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq.

* * *

Throughout the Middle East, its a summer custom for families to sleep on
their slightly cooler rooftops, which are built flat for that purpose. One
recent sweltering night, 12-year-old Mohammed al-Kubaisi climbed the steps
to his familys rooftop, carrying an extra blanket for his twin brother,
Moustafa. At the top, Mohammed turned to watch American soldiers patrolling
the street below. One GI looked up, spotted a figure on the roofline - and
fired.

Mohammeds mother dragged her son inside, screaming as his blood gushed over
the floor. The Americans shoved her aside as they slammed through the house
looking for the ghosts that bedeviled them.

Says Ali Hatem, a 23 year-old computer science student, It has increased
our hate against Americans. It also increases the violence against them. In
Iraq, we are tribal people. When someone loses their son, they want
revenge.

Monetary compensation is an Islamic custom when a killing occurs. If an
acceptable apology and recompense are not forthcoming, the Koran demands
retribution. But as an exasperated Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez,
commander of US forces in Iraq, explained: Apologies are not something that
we have as a normal procedure in the military processes.

* * *

No Americans have visited us to speak about what happened, says Moustafa
Ahmed, 28, after his 24-year-old brother Uday was shot by a soldier from the
82nd Airborne Division while walking home carrying a car part on July 9.

Moustafa watched in horror as his brother doubled over bleeding, then looked
up. A second shot rang out. It hit him, and he dropped, says Moustafa.
There was blood everywhere.

I tried to rush him to the hospital in my car, explained 17-year-old Yaser
Ala. But the Americans - who are modeling their occupation after Israeli
Defence Forces tactics in the West Bank - stopped Moustafa at a checkpoint.
Mohammed bled to death in his car. They asked us what compensation we
wanted, Mohammeds mother said. My husband was incensed. He said he wanted
10 of their men to die in exchange.

Three days later, three synchronized bombs in Ramadi killing a 3rd Armored
Division soldier and wounded two others. A blast near Taji killed a 4th
Infantry grunt and wounded another two GIs as Americas chief civilian
honcho in Baghdad assured reporters, Most of this country is at peace.

* * *

But many GIs are not. Almost every night a C-141 inbound from Landstuhl,
Germany touches down at Andrews Air Force Base, where two ready-alert
fighters were held on the ground all day during Sept. 11 just 12 miles from
the White House.

The huge transport is crammed with wounded. But nearby Walter Reed has been
maxed out since Operation Enduring Bloodshed began in Afghanistan in 2001.
The armys biggest hospital is still so full, patients are being sent to
convalesce in nearby hotels.

Thats just the army. At the nearby national naval medical centre in
Bethesda, marine casualties are also delivered almost daily by a medical
plane known as the Nightingale.
Lt. Col. Allen DeLane is in charge of the agonizing airlift into Andrews.
Explaining that the exact number of wounded is classified, DeLane told
National Public Radio that 8,000 wounded GIs have been in-processed so far.

Upstairs in Walter Reeds orthopedics ward, a 20-year-old private who camped
in a bathroom in one of Saddams palaces, stacking his Chips Ahoy cookies on
a shelf above gold faucets, now moans on a gurney with shrapnel in his belly
beneath a balloon inscribed, Youre the Best!

For 1st Lt. John Fernandez and his new wife, Walter Reed is their first
home. Theyd been married less than a month when John shipped out. Now hes
back, minus a foot and ankle, and most of his other lower leg after stepping
on a land mine near Baghdad. Despite a dozen operations, his absent feet
throb and his lost toes burn. Kristi hasnt left his side since he arrived
in this casualty ward six weeks ago.

This wasnt in the newlyweds five-year plan: Kristi would finish school,
enter public health administration. He would finish his Army tour in 2006,
then go to work as a civilian with his degree in systems engineering. Theyd
start a family. Johns pitiless pain makes sharing a bed impossible for now.

When Garth Stewart was in Iraq, hed lie under camo netting listening to the
plastic leaves rattling in the wind. Closing his eyes, he would imagine he
was home in the Minnesota woods. The explosion that killed three men beside
him is being investigated as yet another friendly fire incident.

Now that hes back in CONUS, all Stewart can think about is Iraq. People
still think the Iraqis just surrendered. The TV didnt show shit! He saw
skulls, melted bodies, bodies with the skin peeling off. At Karbala the
Republican Guard didnt want to take no for an answer.

Danny Roberts sits alone in his new ground-floor rental outside Green Bay,
waiting for a new foot. They pushed his wheelchair in the Memorial Day
parade. He wants the world to be a better place. We got to focus on
homelessness, on education, he says now. We spend more money on guns and
tobacco than we do on education.

Almost as if time is running out, he hurries to record a new message on his
answering machine. Peace, he says.


* * *

Three weeks after the invasion began, the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Jazeera
quoted reliable sources inside the Kuwait hospital morgue, confirming 800
corpses of American GIs. By Aug. 4 the official U.S. military death toll
was 248. Its over 260 now.

Admitted American deaths include 23 fatal vehicle and aircraft accidents,
another 12 killed by their own weapons and explosives, and at least three
dead from fever, itching, scars and dark brown spots on their skin that UN
observers say resemble Depleted Uranium victims in Bosnia and Afghanistan.
(The Pentagon says that U.S. and U.K. forces detonated 2,000 tons of
Depleted Uranium munitions into deadly heavy metals and radioactive dust
during Gulf War II.)

But no one is putting a number on the growing number of suicides among
guilt-stricken soldiers, who thought they were enlisting for a different
kind of education. Now you know. War is all about destruction and violence
and death. It is young men fighting old mens fantasies. It is not the
answer to anything, except maybe intruders attacking your own neighborhood.

Now youre the invader. You know its wrong. But the Big Green Machine is as
sophisticated as any cult in programming frightened, flag-waving robots into
believing that wasting poor countries is A-OK.

Or at least somehow justified. As if millions of shattered families not
unlike your own, in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Grenada,
Nicaragua, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq were guilty of anything except
wanting a better life for their kids.

Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, had it right back in 1933, when he said,
War is just a racket conducted for the benefit of the very few at the
expense of the masses. Apologizing for putting his mental faculties in
suspended animation while obeying the self-serving orders of higher-ups,
the formerly gung-ho gyrene general said hed spent his entire career making
places like Mexico, Haiti, Cuba and Central America safe for American oil
and banking interests.

Gen. Butler came to believe that the only two things Americans should fight
for are the defense of our homes and Bill of Rights. But destroying the
families and neighborhoods of people who have never done us harm only
endangers the lives of Americans, who have surrendered their rights and
freedoms without firing a shot.

You didnt come to Iraq to gun down women and children. You came here to
bring freedom, liberty, free-market capitalism and democracy to people who
lived at the whim of a madman for more than three decades. Its not your
fault your own government helped put Saddam in power. Or supported him with
cash and chemical-biological and nuclear weapons know-how before and after
Desert Storm, while imposing 12 years of strangling sanctions that account
for so much of the destruction and anti-American resentment here.

Maybe it would have been better for Americans, Iraqis and Afghanis if
successive White House administrations hadnt been such big Saddam
supporters. Or given millions of dollars to the Taliban, while ignoring the
mullahs murderous misogyny. Or used Manuel Noriega to bring drugs into
America, where they were sold to illegally arm the Contras. Or trained and
funded Osama bin Laden, and 10,000 other America-hating mujahideen just like
him.

But youre not a politician.

Or a cop.

You simply did your job and did it well. You fulfilled your obligation to
this mission. But your unit is still in country, still being mistreated and
misled. When does it end? You have been in theater since September, and the
only light at the end of this Islamic tunnel is an incoming rocket-propelled
grenade.

How many more innocents need to die, before those neocon fantasists back in
Washington realize that we have hit a wall?
====

Sources (2003):
New York Times Aug. 12; UPI Apr. 10; MSNBC Aug. 13; The Independent July
28; The Guardian Aug 4, 10; Washington Times Aug. 4; Al Minar TV Mar 26;
Saudi Al-Jazeera Apr 11; Washington Post July 21; The Globe July 4; Scott
Fleming in Baghdad Aug 14; Evening Standard June 19; Christian Science
Monitor
Aug. 8; The Observer Apr. 23; BBC Apr. 14; www.hackworth.com.



Glossary:
Camo - camouflage
CONUS - Continental United States; home.
Deros - relieved from active duty and sent home
FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Repair
Herc - four-engine C-130 Hercules troop transport plane. The rocket missed.
grunt - enlisted ground soldier
gyrene - U.S. Marine
KIA - Killed In Action
Remfs - Rear echelon motherfuckers
RPG - Rocket Propelled Grenade
SECDEF - Secretary of Defense


A former member of the U.S. military who resigned his commission in protest
to civilian killing during the Vietnam War, William Thomas served as a
member of a three-man Environmental Emergency Response Team in Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait during and immediately following the last Gulf War. He is the
author of All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion and
Bringing The War Home.
See also his award-winning documentary, >Eco War<.
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The-Informer

Kazoola7@hotmail.com

Why should the UN help? the USA and UK went in against the UNs wishes. It
wasnt sanctioned by them or granted a resolution - why should the UN clean
up someone elses mess, especially after it was in violation of the UN
anyway?