Dick Cheney, Chocolate Bunnies and Sex Scandals

With all due respect to all of you with your Easter bonnets and chocolate bunnies, I think Dick Cheney is in Fat City. So? In the Congress who dares to oppose him on the surge. Thanks to our fine domestic spying service, he has the goods on every bed wetter, cross dresser and pervert on Capitol Hill. Who's left to mention the failure of the administration war policies?
Among the public, who cares? The war families are one percent of the population. Where was the mass media coverage for Winter Soldier? With 81% of our citizens tired of being in Iraq, one might expect a bigger audience for the event.
Eliot Spitzer got all the publicity. Cleverly, he played the sex scandal card establishing him as the man [cad] to beat in 2012 first in name recognition.
We don't care for a holier-than-thou pacifist. We want an in-yer-face varmint who shouts. "So?".

Winter Soldiers Reply to Cheney

A Few Winter Soldiers Speak

Reprints from Opednews

Cheney speaks on ABC’s Good Morning America

CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.

RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

The Replies:

CAMILO MEJIA: My name is Camilo Mejia. I joined the military in 1995 as an infantryman, and I deployed to the Middle East in March of ’03, first to Jordan and then to Iraq in April of that same year.
…
I just—there was this blank space in my memory, which is a blank space that I have for other experiences, like this time when this child was basically riding in the passenger seat with his father, and we decapitated his father with a machinegun. And when we went down to the low ground to search for enemy wounded, I remember seeing this young person standing next to this body that was decapitated. And when I think about it, I cannot remember the expression on the child’s face. I cannot remember that he was a child. I only know this because people told me later on that was the man’s son, the man’s young son, who was standing next to the body.

And it’s because not only—it’s not enough to—to dehumanize the enemy by means of your military background or training or the indoctrination or the heat and the fatigue and the intensity of the environment, but there are times when it is so hard to deal with these experiences that I suppose your own body, your own psyche, in order to protect you from these memories and in order to protect you from losing your humanity, erases certain memories that are too painful to deal with, that are too overwhelming to deal with. And whether it is to punish the men in your squad or the men in your unit or to erase the face of a child whose father was decapitated next to him in a car at a traffic control point, or whether it is to pose next to a dead civilian or Iraqi or whoever, it is necessary to become dehumanized, because war is dehumanizing.

And we have a whole new generation—we have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over five million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead. We have close to 60,000 injured, both by combat injuries and non- combat injuries, coming back from this war. That’s not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. So all that just to say that war is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq.

So?

GEOFF MILLARD: My name is Geoff Millard. I’m the Washington, D.C. chapter president of Iraq Veterans Against the War. I spent nine years in the New York Army National Guard.
…
During a briefing that my unit, the 42nd Infantry Division Rear Operations Center at FOB Speicher, gave to General Casey, I heard him refer to the Iraqi people as hajis. I have heard several generals, including the 42nd Infantry Division Commander, General Taluto, and my own general that I worked for, Brigadier General Sullivan, use these terms in reference to the Iraqi people. These things start at the top, not at the bottom.

I have one story that I want to share with you. One of the most horrifying experiences of my tour that still stays with me was during a briefing that I gave. It was actually in the early summer of 2005. For those who have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, we know that a year becomes a month, a month becomes a day, and a day becomes a second, a second that repeats over and over and over again, not just for your tour, but the rest of your life. So I wish I could name the exact date, but unfortunately that day has become a second that has repeated and repeated and repeated.

But on a day in the early summer of 2005 in the area of operation of the 42nd Infantry Division, there was a traffic control point shooting. Traffic control point shootings are rather common in Iraq; they happen on a near or daily basis. What happened was, a vehicle was driving very quickly towards a traffic control point. A young machine gunner made the split-second decision that that vehicle was a threat, and in less than a minute put 200 rounds from his .50-caliber machinegun into that vehicle. That day, he killed a mother, a father and two children. The boy was age four, and the daughter was age three.

I was in the briefing that evening when it was briefed to the general. And after the officer in charge briefed it to the general in a very calm manner, Colonel Rochelle of the 42nd Infantry Division, DISCOM Commander, turned in his chair to the entire division-level staff, and he said—and I quote—“If these [expletive] hajis learned to drive, this [expletive] wouldn’t happen.” I looked around the TOC at the other officers, at the other enlisted men, mostly higher enlisted. As a sergeant, I think I was the lowest-ranking person in that room. And I didn’t see one dissenting body language, one disagreeing head nod. Everyone was in agreeance that it’s true, if these F-ing hajis learned to drive, this S wouldn’t happen.

So?

JASON HURD: My name is Jason Hurd. I recently completed ten years of honorable service to my country in both the US Army and the Tennessee National Guard. I served in central Baghdad from November of ’04 to November of ’05.
…
Another personal story from my experience, the next mission that we got was to man the main checkpoint that entered into the Green Zone. We called this checkpoint Slaughterhouse 11, because the very first day we got into country, a car bomb went off in that checkpoint. We were a couple of blocks away at the time, and none of us knew what it was, so we were asking around, “What was that? What was that?” Oh, that’s the car bomb that goes off every single morning at checkpoint 11. And that’s where the name Slaughterhouse 11 comes from. You could literally set your watch by the time a car bomb would explode in that checkpoint every day.

Towards the end of my tour, we got the mission to take that checkpoint over. And my unit said, “What is the matter with you people? We’re getting ready to go home in just a couple of months. Why are you giving us Slaughterhouse 11? Are you wanting us to die?”

Day one that we took that checkpoint over and ran it ourselves, a car bomb drove into it and exploded. We found out that there was over a thousand pounds of explosives in that car afterwards. Luckily, it did not hurt any of my guys. My guys were able to find cover, and it didn’t hurt them. But it killed untold numbers of Iraqi civilians in queue to come into the checkpoint and injured so many more. I treated five people that day myself, and I would imagine twenty or thirty others got carted off into civilian ambulances before I could get to them.

But I have an image that is burned into my mind to this very day. And I remember a man running towards me at the front of the checkpoint, carrying a young seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Iraqi guy, very thin, very sort of pale. He came running to me with this guy and laid him at my feet.

I looked down at him, and the guy was missing from here to here of his arm, and his forearm was only held on by a small flap of skin. The bones were protruding, and it was bleeding profusely. He had shrapnel wounds all over his torso. And when I log-rolled him onto his side to check his rear for wounds, I noticed that his entire left butt cheek was missing, and it was bleeding profusely, and it was pooling blood.

And to this day, I have that image burned in my mind’s eye. Almost every couple of days, I will get a flash of red color in my mind’s eye, and it won’t have any shape, no form, just a flash of red. And every time, I associate it with that instance. So not only are we disrupting the lives of Iraqi civilians, we’re disrupting the lives of our veterans with this occupation.

So?

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2008/ 3/ 17/ winter_

The Government's Fault Not Ours

My dad dug ditches during the Great Depression and my mom worked as an industrial nurse until age seventy. My family fought Fascists and Communists all over the world. We didn't fail the government, but it failed us.
They dummied us up with three generations of lying public schools. The CIA murdered six millions over 40 years. How many citizens have the math to count the dead? How many Americans can read well enough to absorb what is happening at the Winter Soldier confab?
I say read, because the boob tube never teaches anything.
Ron Paul says it's all about liberty. Who among the brain washed can comprehend such a complicated subject? I have battled my brain washing for 54 years and I still suffer from it.

Winter Soldier News Blackout [1971]

The "Winter Soldier Investigation" was a media event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War intended to publicize war crimes and atrocities by the United States Armed Forces and their allies in the Vietnam War, while showing their direct relationship to military policies in Vietnam. The three-day gathering of 109 veterans and 16 civilians took place in Detroit, Michigan, from January 31-February 2, 1971. Discharged servicemen from each branch of military service, as well as civilian contractors, medical personnel and academics, all gave testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed during the years of 1963-1970.^[1][2][1]

While the event was not extensively covered outside Detroit several journalists and film crews recorded the event, and a transcript [2] was later entered into the Congressional Record.

A documentary film of the event, called Winter Soldier, was first released in 1972. Due to the disturbing nature of the subject matter about an ongoing war, it got little distribution and support at that time and had been archived by its creators, collectively called the Winterfilm Collective. ^[3][4] In September, 2005, it was re-released across the U.S. in small art house theatres. Many of the media reviews have regarded the film positively. [3]

Wikipedia

Shut Down CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS

WINTER SOLDIER BLACKOUT CONTINUES: Look in the Mirror America!!!!!

By Kevin Stoda, Kuwait

As there are reports across the globe of a USA-wide blackout of major media news from the WINTER SOLDIERS presentations or soldiers’ testimonies on the Iraq and Afghanistan War at the Labor College outside of Washington D.C. this week, it is time to recall that only one week earlier, George W. Bush told American soldiers in Afghanistan that if he was 20 or 30 years younger he’d love to join them. HOGWASH!

What a ludicrous claim, eh? The man did everything he could to stay out of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s—i.e. when the original WINTER SOLDIER hearings took place.

http://www.wintersoldierfilm.com/

Has George Orwell’s predicted-world come fully into reality in the U.S.A. in 2008?

Only the independent media, like REAL NEWS NETWORK http://therealnews.com/web/index.php

, is doing its job.

Otherwise, only the Huffington News seems to have noticed this gaping absence, despite complaints appearing all over the web, like on YAHOO discussion lists.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-cohen/iraq-winter-soldier-heari_b_91776.html

Even the BBC’s coverage has not been as good as one would expect from a respected international news network.

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/bbc-coverage-of-winter-soldier/

This week’s sad and truthful testimonies from Iraqi and Afghanistan during the 5th anniversary of George W. Bush’s illegal pre-emptive attack on Iraq in 2003 should be on the evening news in America for ten minutes a day all this week—or all month till Bush is impeached and the boys and girls of America are called home.

The silence from America is deafening.

No corporate U.S. media was on hand in 1971 for the original WINTER SOLDIER in Michigan. But, why repeat that error?

Now the world’s-most-expensive media conglomerates, like CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS are missing the aircraft carrier of truth in our nation’s harbor

http://www.democracynow.org/

Thank goodness for Democracy Now (which has added over 400 stations since this war on Iraq was revealed as planned by it’s new reporters in August 2002)--and other independents, like Alternet http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79789/

Well, America, I plead with you to spend at least one hour watching some of the hour-long recordings of those presentations.

Go on the web and get hooked on to the biggest news story of 2008 and the most important stories of the past decade—the real stories of our new heroes, WINTER SOLDIERS 2008.

Penny Coleman says, “If America listens to what they say, the war would be over tomorrow.” http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79789/

Make these wars over today, America! http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/79865/

Occupy the congressional offices till the troops are brought out of those quagmires.

Paz note: The jobless network employees can replace the troops in Iraq.