Saturday, March 29, 2003
BBC complains of Pentagon lies ¶ 11:50 AM
Spectre Orange
Guardian report on the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam. This is really long, but worth reading. Most important bits though:
Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Here is a 19-year-old who lives in a 10-year-old's body. She clatters around with disjointed spidery strides which leave her soaked in sweat. When she cannot stop crying, soothing creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is a lunar collage of septic blisters and scabs. "My daughter is dying," her mother says. "My youngest daughter is 11 and she has the same symptoms. What should we do? Their fingers and toes stick together before they drop off. Their hands wear down to stumps. Every day they lose a little more skin. And this is not leprosy. The doctors say it is connected to American chemical weapons we were exposed to during the Vietnam war."
In December 1969, President Nixon made a radical and controversial pledge that America would never use chemical weapons in a first strike. He made no mention of Vietnam or Agent Orange, and the US government continued dispatching supplies of herbicides to the South Vietnamese regime until 1974.
Back in his tiny office, the doctor gestures to photocopies of US Air Force maps, sent by a veterans' organisation because the US government refuses to supply them. These dizzying charts depict the number of herbicide missions carried out over Quang Tri, a province adjacent to the DMZ, from where almost all Nhan's patients come. Its topography is obliterated by spray lines, 741,143 gallons of chemicals dropped here, more than 600,000 of them being Agent Orange. "I'm just scratching the surface," he says.
And this family is not alone. All the adults here, cycling past us or strolling along the dykes, are suffering from skin lesions and goitres that cling to necks like sagging balloons. The women spontaneously abort or give birth to genderless squabs that horrify even the most experienced midwives. In a yard, Nguyen, a neighbour's child, stares into space. He has a hydrocephalic head as large as a melon. Two houses down, Tan has distended eyes that bubble from his face. By the river, Ngoc is sleeping, so wan he resembles a pressed flower. "They told me the boy is depressed," his exhausted father tells us. "Of course he's depressed. He lives with disease and death."
There is cash to be lavished in Vietnam when the US government sees it as politically expedient. Over the past 10 years, more than $350m (£223m) has been spent on chasing ghosts. In 1992, the US launched the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting to locate 2,267 servicemen thought to be missing in action in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Jerry O'Hara, spokesman for JTF-FA, which is still searching for the remains of 1,889 of them, told us, "We don't place a monetary value on what we do and we'll be here until we have brought all of the boys back home."
So it is that America continues to spend considerably more on the dead than it does on the millions of living and long-suffering - be they back home or in Vietnam.
The science of chemical warfare fills a silent, white-tiled room at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Here, shelves are overburdened with research materials. Behind the locked door is an iridescent wall of the mutated and misshapen, hundreds of bell jars and vacuum-sealed bottles in which human foetuses float in formaldehyde. Some appear to be sleeping, fingers curling their hair, thumbs pressing at their lips, while others with multiple heads and mangled limbs are listless and slumped. Thankfully, none of these dioxin babies ever woke up.
One floor below, it is never quiet. Here are those who have survived the misery of their births, ravaged infants whom no one has the ability to understand, babies so traumatised by their own disabilities, luckless children so enraged and depressed at their miserable fate, that they are tied to their beds just to keep them safe from harm
¶ 11:38 AM
Friday, March 28, 2003
From Punk Planet.
To whom it should concern,
We do not believe that supporting the war is analogous to supporting soldiers. Support for the war, contrary to intuition, is support for disenfranchisement; robbing us of our basic economic and moral agency through endangerment of our person. This is an inevitability of institutional conflict; some citizen is going to have to make the sacrifice to go and do the actual fighting. However, the fact that many soldiers embrace this choice does not justify the institutional conflict itself. As US soldiers, we recognize that our decision to fulfill our duty is a necessary sacrifice for the cause of federal republican government. We also recognize that what we really fight, and possibly die for, is a goal not in the hands of the human giving his life, but in the vote of the people determining his or her fate.
A soldier is a human tool. A soldier in the US Army is a seminal vessel of corporate and political desire forcing the course of an entire era of human development and directive. We were US citizens prior to our enlistment oath, since then we have become something greater and lesser, citizen-soldiers. We have given up a portion of rights and freedoms in an oath to serve an institution whose sole official purpose is the protection of all rights and freedoms given to any citizen. Whatever an individual soldier’s personal motivation behind making their oath, the justification for their decision is the well founded rationale of public service. The citizen-soldier is a volunteer, and it is a position that serves by being a surrogate of the public will. Despite the obedience to the Commander in Chief, despite our direct accountability to Congress, the will of the public is sovereign over all aspects of military activity.
The only justification that allows for the existence of the US Army, as a standing policing force equally active in both peace and wartime, comes from a matter of governance. No other precedence in American history, not real or imagined enemies, not current or possible threats, not academic or political ideals; none of these stands above the level of excuse for confusion or abuse of power, save the singular saving grace of public accountability. The Army’s existence is only acceptable as a vehicle of public interest, as an institution in direct service to the people of the United States. The implied complaint here is embodied in the following question; whose will is being done in the current use of the US military infrastructure? Can the public even be understood as sovereign when we find ourselves lost over even basic facts about the “War”; namely what our true motivation in the matter is, who are really our desired targets, and how we expect to benefit from any of our current actions?
The most fundamental complaint is not that this war is happening, because despite unilateral economic motivations and searing blind aggression, Saddam is truly an abusive totalitarian dictator. The real problem is that no one cares about the former assertions, and everyone moves sedately and directly to the latter exception. The point is that it does not matter to anyone that the war as a whole is unjust, self-destructive, and abusive simply because one of its auxiliary conclusions is beneficial. If we don’t evaluate the place in history we are at and simply let the powers that currently set the agenda to continue to direct the public mindset further and further from debate and towards complacent acceptance, then we risk losing sight of the fact that the actions and precedents our nation takes now are overturning a century of international focus and assistance. While the fates and welfare of all humanity becomes more and more intertwined, our current leaders wish to make us more exploitative, reactionary, and isolationist. We must come to terms with the fact that this is an outcome we cannot accept, and that every life on this planet will be made worse because of it. The only way to prevent this situation is to stop accepting the decisions and rationalizations of the present enfranchised leaders.
We ask you to stand up and act now. Responsibility for our common welfare is not limited to the professional politicians. They may represent us, but they also rely on us. As citizen and, more importantly, consumers the course of national and international policy is ultimately determined by our shared will. Shake off your apathy and exercise your rights and duties as Americans to ensure a better future. Speak out, any way you know how and any way you can. Do this before your lives are irrevocably changed, as have ours already, because you will feel the consequences of today’s decisions all too acutely tomorrow.
Todd Arena
Jonathan Hustad
Members of the US Army Reserve
¶ 10:42 PM
One of many pictures taken in Basra before the war by the Iraq Peace Team and Voices in the Wilderness.
'Home isn't safe, the farms are not safe, the market isn't safe. Nowhere is safe.'
Jo Wilding reports for the Guardian
¶ 10:37 PM
Despite yesterday's post, I don't think I have the heart to go on about what's happening in my life here right now. It seems pretty fucking crass to be honest.
The lie that a bloodless war is possible is now well and truely shattered.
'This morning I accompanied April to the Al Kindi Hospital where we interviewed an extended family of 25 that had been living in six houses together on one farm just outside of Baghdad. At 6:00 PM yesterday, B-52s dropped cluster bombs on their farm, destroying all six houses, killing four and severely injuring many others. Even the farm animals were killed. We were told that yellow cylinders landed in their yard, and when they and the animals crept closer to investigate, the bombs detonated. The father of one of these families, Saaed Shalish, age 36 – a farmer, lost two sons but he has not yet been told. Doctors tell me that he’s in critical condition.'
Peace Diaries
And poor Mr Blix is still out there being reasonable.
¶ 12:27 PM
Thursday, March 27, 2003
Today we had a last drinks in the union thing (ok, it probably won't be the last time, but, well... :) ) As requested, here are some of the pictures I took today :)
From left to right: Me, Robyn, Fran, Annette, Tycie, Tim
From left to right: Tom, Robyn, Annette, Mel
From left to right: Charlotte, Laetitia, Freda
From left to right: Becky, Laura ¶ 10:22 PM
