Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss. I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.
The increasing number of Iraqi children affected with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one of the saddest, and least known, legacies of the Iraq war.
A new clinic for their treatment just opened in Baghdad. That it is the first of its kind says a lot about how this problem is being addressed. Until now, as related by journalist Lourdes García Navarro, hundreds of children suffering from PTSD have been treated by Dr. Haider Maliki at the Central Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.
… Children have been the victims of the Iraq political situation for several years. It began with the United Nations sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime, and continued with the U.S.-led wars against the country. The victims have mostly been children. According to some estimates, almost two million children had to leave school and start working in the streets to supplement their families’ meager incomes.
PTSD in children can affect their brain and lead to long term effects that will alter their development. Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine found that children with PTSD were likely to experience a decrease in the size of the brain area known as hippocampus, which is a brain structure important in memory processing and emotion.
Stress sustained over a long period of time is likely to cause more serious effects. An estimated half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by conflict, according to a 2003 UNICEF report.
Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss. I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.
On Sept. 8, an altercation between a 22-year-old Fort Hood soldier and his commanding officer, a 24-year-old lieutenant, ended when the soldier first shot and killed his officer and then turned his gun on himself. Both were assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, which had returned from a 15-month tour in Iraq in December. The division is currently in training to redeploy back to Iraq this winter for another 12 months — which in all probability will turn out to be the as good an explanation as any for the tragedy.
Then on Sept. 9, a VA report acknowledged that suicide rates for young male Iraq- and Afghanistan-era veterans hit a record high in 2006, the last year for which official records are available. Last week, the Portland Tribune reported that in 2005, the last year for which complete Oregon data has been compiled, 19 Oregon soldiers died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. That same year, 153 Oregon veterans of all ages, serving in various wars, committed suicide.
After five years of war in Iraq, Marine suicides doubled between 2006 and 2007, and Army suicides are at the highest level since records were first kept in 1980. Reported suicide attempts jumped 500 percent between 2002 and 2007.
The Defense Department says the numbers may be partly attributable to better compliance with reporting requirement.
Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss. I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.
The outgoing commander of US troops in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, has said that he will never declare victory there.
…In an interview with the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Gen Petraeus said that when he took charge in Iraq “the violence was horrific and the fabric of society was being torn apart”.
A handing over ceremony by US troops to the Iraqi military at a base in Baghdad (09/09/08) Gen Petraeus said the Iraqis were standing up as US forces stood down Leaving his post, he said there were “many storm clouds on the horizon which could develop into real problems”.
Overall he summed up the situation as “still hard but hopeful”, saying that progress in Iraq was “a bit more durable” but that the situation there remained fragile.
He said he did not know that he would ever use the word “victory”: “This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade… it’s not war with a simple slogan.”
Ed. Note: I don’t have the obligatory 9/11 recollection post in me today, in part because of it’s dual significance to my family, since a one year ago today we began what turned out to be a painful period of loss. I’ve posted my recollections previously, and you can read them the post about gay 9/11 victims. Today, I’m going to dedicate to pointing out significant news items and blog posts from others.
Seven years after 9/11, al Qaida and its allies are gaining ground across the region where the plot was hatched, staging their most lethal attacks yet against NATO forces and posing a growing threat to the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
While there have been no new strikes on the U.S. homeland, the Islamic insurrection inspired by Osama bin Laden has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people and shows no sign of slackening in the face of history’s most powerful military alliance.
The insurgency now stretches from Afghanistan’s border with Iran through the southern half of the country. The Taliban now are able to interdict three of the four major highways that connect Kabul, the capital, to the rest of the country.
“I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded before a congressional committee on Tuesday.
Experts inside and outside the U.S. government agreed that a key reason for the resurgence is a growing popular sympathy for the militants because an over-reliance on the use of force, especially airpower, by NATO has killed hundreds of civilians.
Unfortunately, it’s not really Bush. Just the guy who’s playing him in a movie. But it is kinda funny that the lead actor in Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic has been arrested in drunken brawl.
Actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright were arrested during the early hours of Saturday morning after a fight in a bar in a Louisiana city, police said.
Sergeant Willie Lewis said the pair, who star in Oliver Stone’s new film about George W Bush, were held along with five other people in Shreveport.
Officers would not confirm whether Mr Brolin or the others had been released. The Times of Shreveport newspaper said the others arrested were also working on the film, called W.
Filming began in May.
Mr Brolin, who has also starred in American Gangster and No Country for Old Men, plays President Bush.
Wright, best known for playing Felix Leiter in the last two James Bond films, plays former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The US military confirmed yesterday that a marine in Fallujah passed out coins with Gospel verses on them to Sunni Muslims, a military spokesman in the Iraqi city said. The man was immediately removed from duty and reassigned.
The coins angered residents who said they felt that the American troops, whom they consider occupiers, were also acting as Christian missionaries in a predominantly Muslim nation.
“It did happen,” said Mike Isho, a spokesman for Multi-National Force West. “It’s one guy and we’re investigating.”
The marine was passing out silver coins to residents of the Sunni Anbar province with Arabic translations of Bible verses on them. On one side, the coin read, “Where will you spend eternity?” and on the other, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16″.
Following a McClatchy newspaper report about the proselytising coins, a force was sent to the western gate of Fallujah and the Marines there were searched, Isho said. One man was found with the coins, removed from the gate and will no longer be working in predominantly Sunni Anbar province, he said.
Yesterday, the US military apologised for the incident, telling McClatchy special correspondent Jamal Naji that action would be taken following an investigation.
More than 100 nations meeting in Dublin, Ireland, agreed Wednesday on a treaty that would immediately ban all cluster bombs, a spokesman for the Cluster Munition Coalition told CNN.
he accord calls for a total, immediate ban of the weapons, strong standards to protect those injured by them, contaminated areas to be cleaned up as quickly as possible and for the weapons to be immediately destroyed, he said.
Thomas Nash, coordinator of the CMC campaigning organization, said: “This is a great achievement for everyone who has been working hard to see the end of 40 years of suffering from these weapons.”
Though some of the biggest makers of cluster bombs, including the United States, Russia, China and Israel, were not involved in the talks and have not signed the accord, organizers predicted that those nations would nevertheless be pressured into compliance.
“Take the United States,” Nash said. “Almost all of its allies are here. They’ve decided to ban these weapons. That’s going to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to ever use these weapons again, either on its own or in joint operations.”
If my dad were alive, I know he’d be hanging the flag in front of our house, where it would stay for the remainder of the weekend. A veteran of two wars, Korea and Vietnam, my father was fiercely patriotic. Yet, displaying the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day was as much a show of loyalty and respect for those he served with, and — I think — an acknowledgment of that they each carried home a part of those wars inside of them. I learned early on that my father carried his experiences in Vietnam and Korea with home him.
One of the earliest rules I remember learning as a child was how to wake dad up from a nap. Don’t touch him or shake him, I was told. He might be dreaming about being back in Vietnam, or the defensive reflex required to survive there might kick in and the reaction might be violent. So, when it was time to wake him up, we would stand at the door and call to him until he responded, even well into my high school years. Looking back, in think it was a way of not releasing the war inside — the war he carried with him — into our home.
I never knew what my father experienced in Vietnam, or what he re-experienced sometimes when he closed his eyes to sleep. We never talked about it. Even when I wrote a one act play about Vietnam for a high school literary competition. Two of my classmates and I interviewed Vietnam veterans we knew, and placed classified ads to reach more veterans willing to share their experiences. I was surprised by how many were willing, even eager, to talk to three high school boys about what they’d experienced.
But I never interviewed my dad. I was in charge of distilling the interviews into an initial script of monologues that my classmates and I would perform, after they offered their input and edits. But I don’t remember my dad ever reading the script. We performed the play at our county literary competition, and won the chance to perform it at the state competition. But I don’t remember my dad ever seeing the play, or even talking to him about it.
Years later, when my parents came to visit me in Washington, D.C., I took my dad to the Korean and Vietnam war memorials. I watched him walk the length of the Vietnam memorial, stopping at the names of the men he’d known. I witness his silent tears at each stop. Yet, we never talked about his experience. To this day I don’t know what he saw, or what he brought home from those wars.
I think that’s because, though he’d brought home his experiences from the war, he wanted to keep the war — the war inside — out of his home.
Though he passed away just over two years ago, I thought of my dad, and all he kept inside of him when I read about two of the most recent Iraqi veterans to commit suicide. Recruiter Nils Aaron Andersson, who suffered PTSD, shot himself at two o’clock in the morning, on the top floor of a Houston parking garage. Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, who wrote about his PTSD experience, fatally shot his brother and then himself after a cross-state car chase.
News stories about their suicides were published the same week news broke that of a Veterans Administration employee’s email suggesting that veterans with PTSD be diagnosed with disorders that carry a lower disability payment.
An internal e-mail message written by a Veterans Affairs Department employee suggested that the agency avoid giving a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder for veterans and instead consider a diagnosis that might result in a lower disability payment.
The message, dated March 20 and titled “Suggestion,” said: “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that we refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O PTSD.” R/O stands for “rule out.”
“Additionally,” it said, “we really don’t or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”
News of their suicides — Andersson was one of 16 recruiters to take their own lives since 2000 — came one week before documents released by the VA gave further evidence of the agency’s failure to address veterans’ mental health needs.
New VA documents obtained exclusively by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act indicate the VA is only paying disability benefits for PTSD to 33,247 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, although 67,717 have been diagnosed with PTSD. According to Sullivan, VCS is calling for an investigation into this apparent discrepancy.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September 2007 stated that the VA’s "lack of early identification techniques" led to "inconsistent diagnosis and treatment" of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to the GAO, early diagnosis is essential in preventing PTSD’s consequences - which could be deadly.
It’s bad enough that we sent men and women overseas to fight a war founded disinformation, in insufficient numbers, and with inadequate equipment. But, when they come home with deep psychological wounds from that war, and we give them less than the treatment they need, Memorial Day celebrations and speeches ring hollow.
Let’s all pay lip service to Support Our Troops. But if we want to be honest, we should edit those yellow-ribbon bumper stickers to say Support Our Troops — As Long As It Doesn’t Cost Anything.
Let’s acknowledge that this new generation of soldiers and Marines is amazingly motivated and talented. They’re expected to be good killers, good diplomats and ambassadors of American goodwill who operate under impossibly complex rules of engagement in impossibly dangerous and deadly environments.
But if they come home wounded, their brains rattled by the huge IEDs of the new way of war, and if they suffer the horrors of PTSD nightmares and flashbacks, let’s dump them on the streets with the least amount of help and benefits possible, as cheaply as possible.
For sure we don’t want to improve their chances, better their future prospects, by offering them the same college benefits we gave their grandfathers six decades ago. God help us if they all get college degrees and figure out what we’ve done to them.
If my father were alive this Memorial Day, he would still display the flag. But not without anger, if he knew how today’s veterans are abandoned to fight the war inside — the same one he fought when he came home — on their own.
Nope. I guess not. Now, this guy gets handled with kid gloves while spouting this kind of garbage, while Jeremiah Wright gets … well, we all know what he got.
Sometimes you have to take people by the scruff of their necks and stick their noses in the big pile of shit in the middle of the room before they can see it, let alone smell it.
You might wonder why I posted that slideshow. Well, it started gelling in my mind while I was catching up on my blog reading during my commute to work. (Hey, when you have a five-year-old and an infant, you read when you can.) I came across this on the Air America blog.
[Update: Unbelievable. I should have waited a bit to post this. Then I could have included Bush's latest comment: that this is a bill Americans should be happy to pay.]
It’s almost a shame that the subprime mortgage bonanza burned out before the sun finally sets on the George W. Bush administration. After all, they managed to lure Americans into a war we didn’t need and couldn’t afford, then stuck us with a ballooning bill and never ending payments. Reborn as a brokerage firm dealing in subprime mortgages, this administration could have made a killing.
Don’t take my word for it. Just have a look at your bill.
I sat on the panel on “Blog Power: 2008 and Beyond” at the Take Back America conference yesterday, alongside Pam Spaulding, Digby, Tracy Russo, and Chris Bowers. Towards the end, someone in the audience asked a question that made me think about being a progressive means to me, and why I’m a progressive. The question, and I’m paraphrasing here, was “What will the progressive blogosphere do after the election,” when a Democratic president is sworn in and Democratic majorities secured in Congress?
In a previous post last week I alluded to the news that right now Iraq has something we haven’t had in a while: a budget surplus. Apparently, oil revenues are so good that Iraq is rolling in oil money.
But even though that surplus isn’t going to pay for the basic needs of Iraq citizen — like clean drinking water — someone making use of it: the insurgents.
If you haven't yet, take the time to stop by Box Turtle Bulletin, where they have been doing a great series of day-by-day posts on the Matthew Shepard murder. Today's post is a particularly heartbreaking one, about the moment ten years ago when Dennis and Judy Shepard walked into their son's intensive care room and saw him for the first time since the attack. It also links to the earlier posts in the series.
Its sounds like a joke, but it's true. You know the economy has gone South when folks around in Macon (or anywhere else in the south) are going to restaurants and not ordering sweet tea.
Big news. Clay Aiken is gay. Bigger news. So is Lindsey Lohan. Or, at least, she's been dating a woman "for a really long time." I don't know what counts as "a really long time" for Lohan. But kudos to Aiken, at least, for finally coming out. The closet is no place to raise a kid.
See, stuff like this is the reason I don't use Google Ads already. I tried it for a while, but I kept getting advertisements for James Dobsons' books on my posts, and I never found an easy way to block them other than entering the URL into the Google Ads filter every time I discovered one. No thanks.
If you want just one reason to vote for Obama instead of John McCain — and you're someone who cares about reproductive freedom or the right to privacy — the words "Supreme Court" should be enough. If not, consider that George W. Bush appointed more than 300 federal judges during his term, and ask yourself how many more like these you want to see on the bench.
Watching: "Constantine's Sword (2007)", about the evangelical takeover of the United States Air Force Academy, and wondering... ( http:/ ... 1 week ago
Actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright were arrested during the early hours of Saturday morning after a fight in a bar in a Louisiana city, police said.
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