Killing America's Kids: Photo of Dying Marine Draws Fire from Pentagon

Of course Gates, or should I say McNamara the 2nd, is angry, he doesn't want the American people to actually see what REALLY happens to their kids when they are offered up as sacrifices to the imperial Oligarch's neocolonial invasions/occupations by military recruiters/death dealers. The non-defense use of our military by these goons must end!!

Killing America's Kids 

No Big Deal. Hey, They Breed Fast in Tennessee 

September 76, 2009

The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:

BEFORE

Joshua Bernard

Somewhere there is a picture of me, looking almost exactly the same.

“Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard's family is feeling right now, and that Curley's ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency.’

I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.

Big fucking deal. Shit happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The other kid is dead.

But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the US.

But Gates. The words “decency” and “unconscionable” coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. “Intelligence” agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK—they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

AFTER

It could almost make you turn aginst the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Anti-war.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled The War in Afghanistn is Not Worth Another American Life. I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed ninety-five Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis.

Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping acquiescent ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam—they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before—but they learned something more important: Their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.

Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.

In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunch rolls out of his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the trinity of the badly wouned, Mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.

Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional sadists do things to people that would make you gag.

Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t sign.

Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.

Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to refer to smarmy over-groomed bloodthirsty office warts as pussies, saying that they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzalez, Clinton, Perleman, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, George Will, Dershwitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.

http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

Also read: 

Sanitizing War and Occupation: Photo of Dying Marine Draws Fire from Pentagon

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23430.htm

STIMULUS EQUALS WAR

By Nancy Levant
February 26, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

Let us begin with fact.

1. The world has been divided into global regions.

2. The U.S. has been fighting continuous global wars for a century.

3. Joseph Biden and Dick Cheney have publicly declared their current concerns for catastrophic events upon U.S. soil and/or U.S. assets.

4. President Obama is very concerned about catastrophic problems looming on the national horizon.

5. War causes infrastructure and rebuilding projects — always.

Now let us brainstorm.

1. As the world has been divided up into global regions and then sub-regions (America’s ten or eleven sub-regions), let us ponder a few of our global divisions. Region Asia appears to have been assigned the job of world manufacturing. Region Europe appears to have been assigned the job of world governing body since the global organizations are mostly located in Europe. Region America appears to have been assigned the role of world military. The Mideast region, world petroleum.

Now, America as world military goes hand in hand with President Obama’s plan, believing that universal service for all Americans between the ages of 18 to 25 should become mandatory and extended service being the prerequisite to college education. So, in other words, boys and girls will become world soldiers. So much for peace.

2. America has been shipping out American youth for a hundred years to serve in foreign conflicts. And after each and every conflict, and with our military being stretched over the entire planet, it would seem that we are indeed a global military force and not a national force. It is also suggested that at least part of the American military wear UN blue helmets, which also indicate that the American military is now a global military. And as pending legislation awaits to draft both men and women ages 18 to 41, and universal service is inches from mandatory for every young American ages 18 to 25 both male and female, one might guess that peace is not on the agenda and that “The Plan” also does not include peace. One might assume or guess that war is, in fact, an intended agenda item.

3. Former republican vice-president and the current democratic vice-president having both declared a concern for terrorism on U.S. soil and/or U.S. assets suggest insider information or a bi-partisan crystal ball. Therefore, let us ponder another disaster.

After 9/11, we had ourselves quite an infrastructure project — billions and billions of dollars for rebuilding and fixing infrastructure. Massive contracts, massive grant-funded projects, massive profits from massive numbers of infrastructure partners — nothing like war, targets, and damage to create stimulus infrastructure projects to put the people back to work in a country who purposefully eliminated its national jobs in exchange for third-world workers and corporate profits.

4. Our president is worried about catastrophic homeland damage without his nearly trillion dollar stimulus package. His plan to save America is to rebuild America, based upon “change”, while at the same time, he announces universal service requirements for all 18 through 25 year olds, and raises a homeland army to be used on homeland soil while the former American military now serves under global organizations and all over the world, except, of course, in America.

5. Catastrophe always creates the rebuilding of infrastructure which is the basis and foundation of the largest stimulus package in the history of the world. So we ponder, is catastrophe needed to keep the economic stimulus ball rolling?

Now, let us finally consider the U.S. auto industry. Let us assume that the billions handed to this industry came with a few strings attached. Does the federal government or the Federal Reserve Corp. have leans on the U.S. automakers? Do they now own the automakers? And assuming America is the world’s military force, are the automakers going to retool, so to speak, to serve the global war effort? Are they going to build military equipment versus automobiles? Remembering that “human settlements” are now funded with pedestrian walkways and bikeways — auto-free, so to speak.

Keep your eyes wide open. The results of ignorance and apathy have arrived at our doorsteps. Our global job is not to manufacture automobiles. Trust me on this one. Watch for the “retooling” to unfold. Perhaps, the saving grace of the auto industry will suddenly become tanks and helicopters. After all, there is nothing new in history. We have retooled before to serve the war effort. Nationalization of the banks will, of course, be next.

History, history, history, ladies and gentlemen. Let it, therefore, be said, the engine that drives all governments, all economies, and all politicians is and has forever been war/stimulus/restructuring. Same story, new political propaganda language, but the same old story. “Change,” you say? I don’t think so.

And by the way, more troops (17,000) to Afghanistan? Same war, different neighborhood, different administration.

Join us on Govern America this Saturday morning from 8AM to 11AM Eastern time. This week, Michael Cutler, 29 year veteran of the Immigration and Naturalization Service joins us to talk about border issues, drug smuggling and gang violence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

© 2009 Nancy Levant - All Rights Reserve

Nancy Levant is a renowned writer for Constitutional governance and American culture. She is the author of The Cultural Devastation of American Women: The Strange and Frightening Decline of the American Female (and her dreadful timing).

She is an opponent of deceptive governance and politicians, global governance by deception, political feminism, the public school system, political economics based upon manufactured wars and their corporate benefactors, and the Federal Reserve System. She is also a nationwide and lively radio personality. To book an engagement with Nancy Levant, send an email request to:

Not available

http://www.newswithviews.com/Levant/nancy120.htm

I Rage - A Poem

'We must rage; For perhaps it is through rage; That a better world will be born.'

The Palestine Chronicle is pleased to feature a new poem by distinguished South African poet Rassool Snyman.

I Rage

By Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage against

The gods who let the world spin out of control

I rage against the system that deceives us

I rage against the machinery that destroys

Fed by silent people

Acquiescence

Apathy

And trickery

I rage because we should rage

And not be subdued

Or pacified

Or patronized

I rage against the system that watches with glee

As we tear ourselves to pieces

Become monsters that howl at the moon

With bared fangs

And steel claws

I rage because silence kills

I rage because a vote is sometimes

A death warrant

For someone somewhere

I rage

I rage

I rage because our instruments of peace

Have been co opted

Are skewed

Are unjust

And far less than peaceful

I rage because we resurrected Rome from the dead

And gave it powers

To kill

To maim

To create havoc

To veto peace

And turn us all into bloodthirsty beasts

I rage because the colour of my skin

Determines whether I am grieved for

Or ignored

Or blamed

For my own misery and death

I rage silently

I rage openly

I rage with my pen

I rage with my thoughts

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage because we feel pity for the emperor

And none for the victims

Who litter the fields

Maimed

Brutalized

I rage because we are willfully blind

Consciously deaf

And grieve selectively

I rage at our hypocrisy

And false values

At our double speak

And undying

Unconditional

Love of Rome

Love of the emperor

Love of the slave master

Love of the whip

And love of our own humiliation

Degradation

and descent into bestiality
 

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage because children die

Bullets fly

Because we kiss our sanity bye bye

Politicians deny

Because widows cry

Bling bling reflected in every eye

Should I fold my arms and sigh

No

No

No

No

No

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage because I must

I rage because history

Is not changed by submissive men

Or silent men

But by angry men

Who rage at injustice

And spit in the faces of oppressors

And stand by their truths

Like mountains

Steadfast

Resolute
 

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage

Till I revolt

And burn both palace and dungeon

Come brother

Sister

Mother

Daughter

Comrade

Friend

Give me your hand

Rage with me

The silence is deafening

Apathy kills

More insidiously than bullets

Let the drumbeat

Of justice

Pulsate deep within you

Let your blood boil like lava

And your anger like flames

Flare to the sun

Outshining it

Dwarfing it

For it is so that

Temples of vanity

Are burned to cinder

And power destroyed
 

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage

I rage

Until justice is done

And the future of the child assured

Until peace is like the air we breathe

And the fields grow flowers of joy

Not whitened bones

Till the hills of Palestine

Are retuned to their rightful owners

And the olive trees sing in the breeze

Symphonies of leaves and birds

Letters of peace

To a war weary people

In need of respite 

Until every oppressor

Is harnessed

Fears the rage

Of the people

Until then I must rage

You must rage

We must rage

For perhaps it is through rage

That a better world will be born

(South Africa – January 20, 2009; "Tales of Extreme Sanity")

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14801

President Obama 'orders Pakistan drone attacks'

January 23, 2009

(US Air Force/EPA) A Predator drone

Tim Reid in Washington

Missiles fired from suspected US drones killed at least 15 people inside Pakistan today, the first such strikes since Barack Obama became president and a clear sign that the controversial military policy begun by George W Bush has not changed.

Security officials said the strikes, which saw up to five missiles slam into houses in separate villages, killed seven "foreigners" - a term that usually means al-Qaeda - but locals also said that three children lost their lives.

Dozens of similar strikes since August on northwest Pakistan, a hotbed of Taleban and al-Qaeda militancy, have sparked angry government criticism of the US, which is targeting the area with missiles launched from unmanned CIA aircraft controlled from operation rooms inside the US.

The operations were stepped up last year after frustration inside the Bush administration over a perceived failure by Islamabad to stem the flow of Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters from the tribal regions into Afghanistan. Mr Obama has made Afghanistan his top foreign policy priority and said during his presidential campaign that he would consider military action inside Pakistan if the government there was unable or unwilling to take on the militants.

The strikes come just a day after Mr Obama appointed Richard Holbrooke, a former UN ambassador, as a special envoy for the region.

Eight people died when missiles hit a compound near Mir Ali, an al-Qaeda hub in Pakistan's North Waziristan region. Seven more died when hours later two missiles hit a house in Wana, in South Waziristan. Local officials said the target in Wana was a guest house owned by a pro-Taleban tribesman. One said that as well as three children, the tribesman's relatives were killed in the blast.

Pakistan has objected to such attacks, saying they are a violation of its territory that undermines its efforts to tackle militants. Since September, the US is estimated to have carried out about 30 such attacks, killing more than 220 people.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece