All those young kids being killed over there (Im talking about US Troops), and he's smug touring the country spouting his BS. I'd like to see him send his son or daughter over there to 'protect American interests'. Just a thought.
I'd like to see that fat fucker Cheney over there getting shot at. I bet his weak little heart wouldn't last 5min. What a man.
At least 17 US troops have committed suicide in Iraq; Army seeks answers NEW YORK Nov 24 - Rebecca Suell wants answers, and not the ones the US Army is giving her. Why does the Army keep calling the last letter her husband sent to her, the one he mailed from Iraq on June 15, a suicide note? Can taking a bottle of Tylenol really kill you? And how did he get his hands on a bottle of Tylenol in the middle of the desert anyway? The questions may differ, but experts say the desperate search for answers - and the denial - are usually the same. Since April, the military says, at least 17 Americans - 15 Army soldiers and two Marines - have taken their own lives in Iraq. The true number is almost certainly higher. At least two dozen non-combat deaths, some of them possible suicides, are under investigation according to an AP review of Army casualty reports. No one in the military is saying for the record that the suicide rate among forces in Iraq is alarming. But Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American military commander in Iraq, was concerned enough, according to the Army Surgeon General's office, to have ordered a 12-person mental health assessment team to Iraq to see what more can be done to prevent suicides and to help troops better cope with anxiety and depression. Army spokesman Martha Rudd said the assessment team returned from Iraq two weeks ago, but that it will take several weeks to come up with recommendations. Until then, she said, no one on the team will have anything to say to the press. Whether the suicide rate among the troops should be considered high is impossible to say because there is nothing to compare it with, experts say. What would be considered a ``normal'' rate for an all-voluntary military force of men and women on extensive deployments to the Middle East, under constant pressure from guerrillas who use terror tactics? Rudd said that by the Army's calculations, its suicide rate in Iraq is roughly 12 per 100,000 - well below the civilian suicide rate for US men of 17.5 suicides per 100,000. The comparison is misleading, however. The civilian rate is an annual figure, and the Iraq figure covers only about seven months. Furthermore, the troops have not yet spent their first holiday season in Iraq - a time when the risk of suicide is traditionally at its highest. The troops in Iraq include thousands of women, who typically have a lower suicide rate than men. And the Army figure does not include possible suicides among the non-combat deaths yet to be explained. Whatever the 12-month suicide figure turns out to be, the Army is not satisfied that it is low enough. The Army has an extensive suicide prevention program, with soldiers ``all the way down the chain'' of command trained to recognize the warning signs of suicide and how best to intervene, Rudd said. ``Zero suicides is our goal,'' she said. ``We may not get there, but we're going to try.'' In all, 424 US troops have died in Iraq. The military has characterised 130 of the deaths as ``non-hostile,'' including 106 since President George W. Bush officially declared major hostilities over on May 1. Most if not all the confirmed suicides occurred after May 1, according to the military. According to an AP analysis of military reports, non-combat deaths include 13 caused by a weapons discharge, two from drowning, one from breathing difficulties and one described only as ``medical.'' An additional 13 are listed with no cause given. For Rebecca Suell and many of the families of soldiers who are believed to have killed themselves in Iraq, answers are as hard to come by as sleep. Night after night, Suell said, she lies awake asking herself the same questions. Why, as sad and as tired of Iraq as he said he was, would her husband take his own life when she had just told him how much she loved him, how much the kids missed him and needed him? Why would a man who loved the Lord so much - who told her on the day he died that he felt he was getting closer and closer to God every day - defy his Lord's strictures against taking his own life? But the more she sobs, the clearer it becomes that Joseph D. Suell, posthumously promoted to sergeant, was in crisis the day he died - so desperate to come home that he even asked his wife to talk to his commanding officer. And she did. She told him, she said, how life was so hard without her husband, how going to nursing school and working at Wal-Mart and trying to raise three children, all at the same time, was too much for her to bear alone. She told him how her husband had no sooner finished serving a year and half in Korea than he was sent to Iraq, that in five years as a soldier she had been with him less than 18 months. She told his commanding officer that their youngest daughter didn't even know her father, that he was away the day she was born, and that all her husband really wanted was to be at home with his family in Lufkin, Texas, for Christmas. Just a month or two, she begged, and then you can have him back. His commanding officer, she said, told her that the Army was doing everything it could to get him back to her but that he couldn't promise it would happen in time for Christmas. The Army will not talk about Suell's death, nor does it publish, out of concern for the families, the names of soldiers who have killed themselves in Iraq. But Rudd, the Army spokesman, said it is not unusual for family members to question whether a loved one's death was a suicide. It is for that reason, she said, that it often takes months to complete an investigation into a soldiers death. For the sake of the family, Rudd said, ``we need to be absolutely certain.'' In many respects, Joseph Suell does not fit the profile of a soldier who commits suicide. Typically, mental health experts said, such suicides are triggered by a ``Dear John'' message from home. Even among civilians, one of the common triggers ``is a rupture of a relationship,'' said David Shaffer, a Columbia University psychiatrist and former consultant for the Department of Defense. But there are always deeper reasons, usually far murkier and far more complex, experts said. Like the wars they fight, no two soldiers who commit suicide face the same mix of potentially deadly stress. ``In most previous conflicts you went, you fought, you came home,'' Rudd said. ``In this one they went, they fought, they're still there.'' Rudd said she knows of no studies that show a definitive correlation between length of deployment and military suicide rates. But Michelle Kelley, a psychiatrist who studies deployment-related stress for the Navy, said the longer the deployment, the greater the strain on a relationship with a loved one. The military, she said, needs to be especially watchful for anxiety and depression among its troops in the weeks ahead. For civilian and soldier alike, the Christmas season and depression go hand in hand, Kelley said. But for a soldier, she added, a weapon is always at hand. Soldiers, she said, must be encouraged to seek help when they need it. For that reason, she expressed concern about the case of Pfc. Georg-Andreas Pogany. The soldier, assigned to a Green Beret interrogation team, began throwing up after seeing the severed body of an Iraqi civilian three days after being deployed to Iraq. After seeking help for a self-described anxiety attack, he was ordered back to the United States and became the first soldier since Vietnam charged with cowardice - a charge later reduced to dereliction of duty. That, Kelley said, is ``the last thing you want to do'' if you want soldiers to seek help in times of stress ... You need to make it clear to those people who have witnessed something traumatic that they need to talk about it - that they won't be stigmatised for doing so and that it's not going to follow them through their military career.'' Shaffer, the Columbia University psychiatrist, said it is not that simple. A commanding officer's decision to file a cowardice charge might, in some circumstances, even be a morale boost for the soldiers under his command, he said. Shaffer warned against drawing any conclusions based on the number of suicides in Iraq. Suicide rates vary greatly over time, he said, and also vary with race, ethnicity, religion and other factors. African Americans, for example, have a lower suicide rate than the general US population. So do those who describe themselves as deeply religious. Drug use, alcoholism and a low education level, on the other hand, are correlated with higher suicide rates. A comparison of the suicide rate among troops in Iraq with troops in other wars such as Vietnam are meaningless, he said, because the makeup of the fighting forces were so different. (According to the Army, there are no reliable statistics on the suicide rate during the Vietnam War.) Shaffer said there is also some evidence that those who serve in the Army for a long time have a higher suicide rate than civilians. This is probably because ``some longstanding servicemen do develop alcohol problems over time, and alcohol use is very strongly related to suicide,'' he said. Rudd, the Army spokesman, also adds something else to the mix: ``Technology today allows people to connect with the home front much more quickly and intimately and often than in previous conflicts,'' she said. That's not necessarily a good thing if the news from home is bad. Young people can be impulsive, she said, ``and Dear John letters and things like that can be very upsetting to a young soldier.''
Thing is, fearful, personally highly insecure Cowards never were, aren't, and never will be into true courage and heroism. They're into the kind of duplicitous spin, lies and deceit that have caused the totally needless death and mutilation of tens of thousands of Iraqis and American kids. High time to frog march our blood thirsty Con-Artist-in-Chief Bush and gang off to jail where they belong:
in advance of his re-election win in 2004. George W. congratulations, you deserve it, for the excellent job you've done in the war on terrorism so far. We need you for 4 more years! We should thank our lucky stars every day Gore wasn't elected. I only shudder to think how close the terrorists would be to striking us again, if this buffoon were president.
America's enemy within Armed checkpoints, embedded reporters in flak jackets, brutal suppression of peaceful demonstrators. Baghdad? No, Miami Naomi Klein Wednesday November 26, 2003 In December 1990, President George Bush Sr travelled through South America to sell the continent on a bold new dream: "A free trade system that links all of the Americas." Addressing the Argentine Congress, he said that the plan, later to be named the Free Trade Area of the Americas, would be "our hemisphere's new declaration of interdependence the brilliant new dawn of a splendid new world." Last week, Bush's two sons joined forces to try to usher in that new world by holding the FTAA negotiations in Florida. This is the state that Governor Jeb Bush vowed to "deliver" to his brother during the 2000 presidential elections, even if that meant keeping many African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Now Jeb was vowing to hand his brother the coveted trade deal, even if that meant keeping thousands from exercising their right to protest. Despite the brothers' best efforts, the dream of a hemisphere united into a single free-market economy died last week - killed not by demonstrators in Miami but by the populations of Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia, who let their politicians know that if they sign away more power to foreign multinationals, they may as well not come home. The Brazilians brokered a compromise that makes the agreement a pick-and-choose affair, allowing governments to sign on to the parts they like and refuse the ones they don't. Washington will continue to bully countries into sweeping trade contracts on the model of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but there will be no single, unified deal. Inside the Inter-Continental hotel, it was being called "FTAA lite". Outside, we experienced something heavier: "War lite". The more control the US trade representatives lost at the negotiating table, the more raw power the police exerted on the streets. Small, peaceful demonstrations were attacked with extreme force; organisations were infiltrated by undercover officers who used stun guns; buses of union members were prevented from joining permitted marches; people were beaten with batons; activists had guns pointed at their heads at checkpoints. Police violence outside trade summits is not new; what was striking about Miami was how divorced the security response was from anything resembling an actual threat. From an activist perspective, the protests were small and obedient, an understandable response to weeks of police intimidation. The FTAA Summit in Miami represents the official homecoming of the "war on terror". The latest techniques honed in Iraq - from a Hollywoodised military to a militarised media - have now been used on a grand scale in a major US city. "This should be a model for homeland defence," the Miami mayor, Manny Diaz, said of the security operation that brought together over 40 law-enforcement agencies, from the FBI to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. For the Miami model to work, the police had to establish a connection between legitimate activists and dangerous terrorists. Enter the Miami police chief, John Timoney, an avowed enemy of activist "punks", who classified FTAA opponents as "outsiders coming in to terrorise and vandalise our city". With the activists recast as dangerous aliens, Miami became eligible for the open tap of public money irrigating the "war on terror". In fact, $8.5m spent on security during the FTAA meeting came out of the $87bn Bush extracted from Congress for Iraq last month. But more was borrowed from the Iraq war than just money. Miami police also invited reporters to "embed" with them in armoured vehicles and helicopters. As in Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo soldiers with zeal, suiting up in combat helmets and flak jackets. The resulting media coverage was the familiar wartime combination of dramatic images and non-information. We know, thanks to an "embed" from the Miami Herald, that Timoney was working so hard hunting down troublemakers that by 3:30pm on Thursday "he had eaten only a banana and a cookie since 6am". Local TV stations didn't cover the protests so much as hover over them. Their helicopters showed images of confrontations, but instead of hearing the voices on the streets - voices pleading with police to stop shooting and clearly following orders to disperse - we heard only from police officials and perky news anchors commiserating with the boys on the front line. Meanwhile, independent journalists who dared to do their jobs and film the police violence up close were actively targeted. "She's not with us," one officer told another as they grabbed Ana Nogueira, a correspondent with Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! who was covering a peaceful protest outside the Miami-Dade county jail. When the police established that Nogueira was "not with us" (ie neither an embedded reporter nor undercover cop) she was hauled away and charged. The Miami model of dealing with domestic dissent reaches far beyond a single meeting. On Sunday, the New York Times reported on a leaked FBI bulletin revealing "a coordinated, nationwide effort to collect intelligence" on the anti-war movement. The memorandum singles out lawful protest activities. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the document revealed that "the FBI is targeting Americans who are engaged in lawful protest. The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred." We can expect more of these tactics on the homeland front. Just as civil liberties violations escalated when Washington lost control over the FTAA process, so will repression increase as Bush faces the ultimate threat: losing control over the White House. Already, Jim Wilkinson, director of strategic communications at US Central Command in Doha, Qatar (the operation that gave the world the Jessica Lynch rescue), has moved to New York to head up media operations for the Republican National Convention. "We're looking at embedding reporters," he told the New York Observer of his plans to use some of the Iraq tricks during the convention. "We're looking at new and interesting camera angles." The war is coming home. http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1093185,00.html