our next president

had damned well better be able to say "nuclear".

Try opening about 5 iterations of this page at once. And brace your ears.

responsibility

If the United States sells US$63 Billion+ worth of deadly weapons to Middle Eastern nations over the next ten years, and those weapons are used to kills 10's of thousands of civilians, and injure and maim tens of thousands more, what difference does it make to an average citizen of the U.S., such as myself? Does karma, fate, providence, or justice require that I ultimately bear any of the pain, horror, and darkness which the proliferation of these weapons shall doubtless cause?

I mean after all, what consequences has the average U.S. citizen faced for the nearly 300,000 civilians we killed when we dropped the only 2 atomic weapons ever used in warfare by any nation?

God bless (only) America. Here's to democracy, peace, and freedom, and lots and lots of money for the CEO's of ... Honeywell, for instance.



Is this man more evil than I am? Somehow, I seriously doubt it.

The poverty draft?

Overall, the Pentagon spends about US$2.5 Billion a year targeting high achieving, low income youth with commercials, video games, personal visits, and slick brochures.

So over the last couple weeks I've been exposed to some Marines recruiting ads on late night television. Usually they are with sound off, so they're slightly less offputting. Here's a little compilation, including one of the ones I've been seeing. I forced myself to watch all 6.5 minutes of this. Can you stomach it?



And here's the reality which our marines and other armed services have brought to Iraq.



So they have to deal with the mental aftermath of *that*, not to mention the *soldies themselves--3500 killed and 26,000 (that's TWENTY SIX THOUSAND) wounded. It's all so glorious, courageous, proud, blah blah blah etc.

God I can't decide whether to be furious, or literally sickened in my gut. I find myself hovering between these two reactions, so generally I turn my eyes away from these recruiting commercials.

Your reaction?

Plot to overthrow Laotian government

In case you didn't pick this up on the news today. A retired U.S. army officer and a former Laotian general were arrested in California today, along with several others, on charges related to an alleged plot to overthrow the Laotian government by force. The plot involved plans to buy and ship lots and lots of arms to Loas, Thailand, and Vietnam.

U.S. Attorny Scott was quoted as saying

The United States cannot provide a safe harbor to those plotting to overthrow a
government with whom we are at peace

I found this intriguing. What do you know about Laos? Are you aware that the U.S. conducted a secret air war over laos in the 60's and 70's with such an intensity of bombing that Laos became (and remains) the most bombed country in history. We dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped on all of europe during world war II.

Why?--I'm confused, again.

Today this story from BBC about a seven day old armed conflict between the government of Lebanon and and "Islamic militants" who have taken control of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. I have lots of questions about this. Why did "Islamic militants" take over a refugee camp? How is "sending in the army" going to help de-escalate/improve the situation? And most ... strangely to me:

Why is the United States delivering military equipment to the Lebanese army as assistance for this situation?

I just don't get it. Is it kind of like we want to make sure we want to get our own whatever sized piece of the culpability for whatever innocent people die? Confused, again.

I said to Megsie "Okay, I thing I figured it out. There are lots of people in this country who are okay with accepting culpability for the death of the innocent in the name of the grand end goal of MTWABP". and she said "Oh, so the end justifies the means? Is that kind of like how the terrorists think?".

She went on to say "I think it's more understandable if you are able to realize that this is just another greedy country which is jumping into the fray. But there is this powerful myth in this country that America is somehow God's country and with good pure motives, so that kind of confuses things, because they are not behaving in a way that is consistent with that. People think they are, but then it works out to not be good for the other countries, and that's why it's confusing."

That was helpful

this week in U.S. occupied Iraq

It seems to me that's it's important to keep this in front of our eyes, since after all, we are spending something like US$200 million/minute to (presumably) accomplish something over there.

So last week:

• An additional 585 civilian deaths. That breaks down to 140 on Monday, 60 on Tuesday, 90 on Wednesday, 50 on Thursday 60 on Friday, 45 on Saturday, and 140 more on Sunday) (Try not to think about the fact that every one of these has a name, a father, a mother, friends, ..... etc.)
• The 585 doesn't include the 2 newborns who died in their incubators in Samarra due to a power outage and the fact that they couldn't be transferred to another hospital because security measures prevented ambulances from entering or leaving the city. (by the way, it's count discrepancies like these which account for the difference between Iraq body count's 69000 figure and John Hopkins University 690,000 figure)
• The Tuesday total includes 7 primary school children killed by a U.S. Helicopter while shelling their primary school in Al Nedawat village.

(just as an aside, how would you like to have one of these fuckers shooting at your school? Your children's school? I wonder why we don't deal with terorrist school shooters in this country by dispatching longbow apaches? When I was young, I used to thing these were kewl. Don't even pay attention to the weapons mounted on the side. The really scary one is the M230 30 mm chain gun under the fuselage. It can shoot 625 rounds per minute. But the really crazy thing is the honeywell (an evil corporation if ever there was one!) M142 IHADSS. That's for "Integrated Helmet and Display Sight System". What it boils down to is that the chain gun can be hooked up to the helmet, on the head of the pilot, in such a way that the chain gun points at what the pilot looks at. I've seen this in operation, and it's pretty freaking scary. I used to think it was kewl. I guess I grew up a little.)

• News that mortality of children under 5 has risen 150% since the original 1990 invasion, from 50/1000 to 125/1000. (Don't think too much about that, you might get depressed)

Follow the weekly roundup of Iraq's devastaion with Lily Hamourtziadou

havoc and coulds/shoulds

One of my favorite people, whom shall rename nameless since I don't have their permission to quote, recently said to me in an email:

Perhaps you are right that we have the potential to wreak havoc on the rest of the world--but we haven't. Not even in nations we could/should have.

This intrigued me. So I tracked down this partial list of U.S. military interventions from 1890 to 2007.

Total countries since 1990?: 20! The list includes: Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Haiti, Liberia, Columbia, Philippines Afghanistan, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Zaire (Congo), Bosnia, Albania, Sudan, Somalia, Kuwait, the U.S., Angola, and Saudi Arabia.

Push it back to 1980 and you can throw in Panama, Libya, Iran, Bolivia, Honduras, Grenada, Lebanon, Nicaragua, and El Salvador.

Quick--How many of these countries can you even place on their correct continent? Name their language?

Maybe we can amend the constitution so that A. To be elected president, you have to fluent in at least 3 languages, as determined by an objective panel of Ph.D.'s in those languages. and B. Before a president can authorize bombing any country or people group, he has to be at least ... conversant in their primary language, again as determined by an objective group of Ph.D.'s in that language.

Did you/do you have an idea about/knowledge of most of these "military interventions"? 50% of them? 20% of them? What is your reaction to this list? I was really surprised. I, (bleeding heart liberal antiwar peace loving freakazoid hippie that I am) had no idea about a lot of these.

By the way, what exactly would constitute a story where we "could/should have wreaked havoc on a nation?", IYNSHO?

(Further by the way, for a story where we *definitely did* wreak havoc when we could but shouldn't have, just google "secret war in Laos", and spend 20 minutes reading about this still "least developed country"

The list of countries above does *not* include:

• mobilizations of the National Guard
• offshore shows of naval strength
• reinforcements of embassy personnel
• the use of non-Defense Department personnel (such as the Drug Enforcement Administration)
• military exercises
• non-combat mobilizations (such as replacing postal strikers)
• the permanent stationing of armed forces
• covert actions where the U.S. did not play a command and control role
• the use of small hostage rescue units
• most uses of proxy troops
• U.S. piloting of foreign warplanes
• foreign or domestic disaster assistance
• military training and advisory programs not involving direct combat
• civic action programs
• and many other military activities.

Tuesday Videos: Cluster munitions.

We dropped *millions* of these little fuckers in Laos and Vietnam way back in the 60's and 70's, and little kids and adults in their agricultural subsistence economies still find them and get killed or maimed by them every year. The government of Laos (understandably) *won't* have any U.S. government help to continue the massive cleanup that is still going on 3 decades later, so it's all being done on the relatively tiny budgets of the government of Laos and handful of extremently kewl, extremely dedicated NGO's.

The completely fucked thing is that we are still making and still dropping these little horrors *this* year! So in 40 years, we can still be killing innocent civilians with the unexploded bomblets.

huh?

The site of the bombing in Kapisa Province, northeast of Kabul.s


two headlines from today's new york times:

1.U.S. Airstrike Kills 9 in Afghan Family
2.Bush Approves Aid Programs for Latin America

From the first story:

Nine members of a family were killed in an American airstrike in central Afghanistan, including five women and three children during a battle with militants, Afghan officials said today. The United States military acknowledged it had dropped two 2,000 pound bombs on a compound Sunday night. ... United States forces would work with the Afghan authorities to “investigate and identify those responsible,” the statement (from the U.S. military) said.

From the second story:

''The United States of America is committed to helping people rise out of poverty,'' the president said. ... ''In an age of growing prosperity and abundance, this is a scandal and it is a challenge,'' Bush said.

I'm confused.

american military death toll in iraq passes 3000

Replacements needed has been producing these posters every week for quite a while now. I think they speak very eloquently. The more significant number, perhaps, is the 22,000 american military wounded. Or ... how about this question: How is the death or injury of 25,000 americans in iraq related to the US$28 Billion in revenues and US$1.6 Billion in profits in 2006 of the biggest arms producer in our nation, Honeywell International, which is ranked 71 in the country by Fortune 500? Hmmmm... Do Bush and co. own any honeywell stock?

We've spent $400 billion to figure out what the French could have told us for free--you can't fix centuries old civil wars in 4 years, no matter *how* much money or military power you can bring to bear. period.

On a similar note: How would you like to have this guy's nightmares, or responsibility? This is Dan Murphy, CEO of Alliant Tech Systems, the biggest small arms ammunition manufacturer in the country. ATK had sales of US$3.2 Billion in '06. As producer of ~90% of the small arms ammunition for both the US military *and* the "sports enthusiast and law enforcement" markets, they produced the ammunition which killed around 27,000 individuals who died through the use of firearms in 2004. That's based on approximately 30,000 firearms related deaths in 2004 reported by the CDC. They also no doubt produced the ammunition which killed some significant percentage of the 57,000 dead iraqi military mentioned in the poster above, whom you will probably never hear talked about on mainstream american media. You can check out their annual report here (You'll need high speed connection--it's big)