My dad always responded to anything that was patently obvious
with, "Well, yea-ah. Anybody with half sense and one eye knows that," which was
his way of saying don't go with the flow, but look at facts and come to your own
conclusions. He also said, "If you're determined to show your ass, make sure
it's a clean 'un," or -- get those facts straight before you jump out there and
start concluding...
Well, I've looked at heaps and piles of facts about
what the deranged leaders of this nation are willing to do to the men and women
who wear the US military uniform, and I've come to two conclusions. This
country's most expendable commodity is its children and, with few exceptions,
Americans appear to be both senseless and blind.
Give Us Your Young, Your Poor... Of
course there's going to be a draft, if for no other reason than George Bush has
steadfastly promised there wouldn't be one.
They're coming after our
children -- sweeping them all up -- bullying them at schools, stalking them,
offering them big bucks to join the military. And there's no one to stop them.
Servile Americans, even those who can still see, feel helpless. When faced with
the decision to stand up and speak up, or give up their children, they are
bombarded from all sides with strident demands for patriotism so, like their
counterparts of empirical Rome, Americans await their fate -- their children's
fate -- in silent despair.
There is nowhere to hide -- no one to turn
to. The mainstream media has dropped all pretense of objectivity and has become
a worthless tool of the state. The media's once envied "public service" to the
people has become little more than applauding each new atrocity of this
warmongering administration in the hopes of earning a share of the spoils.
Vigilant no longer, the watchdog media has become, in the words of Czech
novelist Milan Kundera,
"a parade of people
marching by with raised fists . . . shouting identical syllables in
unison." We can forget the Congress suddenly realizing it has a
Constitutional mandate for oversight and restraint. Ain't gonna happen. The
elected members of both parties are far too busy struggling under the weight of
their own corruption to worry about the relentless dismantling of the republic
or the worldwide chaos their lack of attention is causing. There's no indication
that the injury, maiming or death of thousands of US servicemembers, or as Henry
Kissenger describes them, "dumb, stupid animals" will appear on their radar as
long as the media can prevent it from appearing on ours. They're not only cold,
they're evil. Rotten to the core. Rotten from the core -- on in...
On
February 8, President George Bush proudly bragged to Tim Russert on Meet the
Press,
"I'm a war president. I make decisions
here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind."
Do you hear that, moms and dads? If your president's juvenile, paranoid
announcement doesn't cross your minds whenever you're loading up your sons and
daughters and sending them off to Iraq -- perhaps it will as you unload their
flag-draped coffins at your cemeteries when they return home...
Many
foolishly believed Bush's signature legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act,
meant that all children in this country -- all children -- would have equal
opportunity for education. However, it didn't take long for those paying
attention to realize that, as with anything Bush tells us, the opposite is true.
The No Child Left Behind Act is little more than an increasingly harsh and
punitive testing apparatus, the funding of which has been pushed off on states
in a Catch-22 requirement -- either fund the program and meet the testing
standards or face sanctions and, ultimately, closure.
Other than
underfunding it, putting sanctions on schools, and wreaking havoc throughout the
public school system, Bush has mostly ignored the Act's provisions -- with one
exception. Buried deep within its 670 pages is a requirement that secondary
school officials must
provide contact
information for every student as well as allow military
recruiters unlimited access to their facilities, or lose federal aid. From the
various sites these uniformed child abusers are setting up shop, primarily in
minority neighborhoods and lower socio-economic areas, it's obvious whose
children are being targeted. If Bush succeeds, none of them will be left behind.
Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It's Off To War We
Go...
The empire is in the hands of a single madman who demands
that we show our loyalty and patriotism by trading our humanity, our freedom,
our dignity and, sadly, our children, for the mere illusion of safety in a world
that is crumbling around us.
There are times when war, if not
inevitable, is unavoidable although, to my mind, rarely justifiable. We needed a
Pearl Harbor to drop-kick a foot-dragging nation through the goal posts of World
War II, just as we needed a draft to mobilize the necessary manpower. We had an
enemy. That enemy had a name and a face. Once he was defeated, the war was over.
Of the 16.1 million Americans who served in WWII, 406,000 were killed and
671,000 wounded. The remaining troops returned to cheers, parades and dancing in
the streets.
Korea and Vietnam taught us that war is not a John Wayne
movie, an Uncle Sam poster, or a "Johnny Comes Marching Home" ditty after all.
We learned, too late, that Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and
Richard Nixon were actually pretty pre-emptive kinds of guys -- not "shock and
awe" shysters, but men who were willing to expand, little by little, an initial
deployment of 900 military "advisors," escalating the destruction over 15 years
by sending more and more until our bewildered children were standing knee-deep
in an oozing quagmire with no clear idea of who the enemy was. It had neither
name nor face; therefore, they were forced to shoot anything that moved.
Of the 2.1 million American servicemen and women who struggled through
the Vietnam mess, 58,156 were killed, 303,329 were wounded in action, and 75,000
were severely disabled. These figures do not include the tens of thousands who
suffer from the effects of Agent Orange and who continue to battle for benefits
and proper care from a Veteran's Administration in full denial about
repercussions from "gassing" our own people. Unlike heroes from WWII, those who
returned were met with jeers and catcalls; many were abandoned in the streets.
The number of veterans who have committed suicide since the Vietnam war is
greater than the number who were killed in that war.
Vietnam was a
soul-numbing fiasco -- an undeclared war that resulted in a litany of human
rights abuses and atrocities too numerous to cite. It gave suceeding
administrations an unabated taste for blood and power as well as a cold,
pugnacious disregard for "collateral" damage. Might is right. George Bush has
the power. He has tasted the blood. He likes it, and he wants more. He wants it
all the time. If 9-11 had not happened, Bush's addiction would have forced him
to create it.
As CNN correspondents like to say proudly, "this
president" is having the time of his life. Given the grisly silence of the
citizenry, of the judicial branch, the legislative branch and the mainstream
media, Bush is under no pressure to justify the senseless maiming and killing
spree upon which he is embarked, even if he could remember the reason -- or
coherently describe the enemy who has no face. Shortly after the devastating
assault upon Iraq in 2003, a self-satisfied Bush crowed, "We're
on their trail. We're smokin' em out. We got em on the run. We're huntin' em
down one-by-one. We're on a scavenger hunt for terror..."
A scavenger hunt for terror? This is why
thousands of young Americans must give up their lives before they've had a
chance to live them? Hundreds of thousands of innocents must die -- nations must
be destroyed -- for no other reason than George Bush is off on a scavenger hunt?
Well, yea-ah.
A Toxic Mess
Thanks to
the morally bereft Bush father-son duo, as well as the morally challenged Bill
Clinton, we are rapidly becoming an endangered species. The culprit is Depleted
Uranium (DU), the neat little nuclear weapon of choice these three presidents
unleashed upon Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, turning them into toxic
wastelands and condemning anyone on their soil to a slow, agonizing death from
radiation.
America -- do you know where your children are tonight?
There is no excuse for not knowing the consequences of DU. Scores of
reports have been written based on studies and investigations conducted since
1991. Physicians, physicists, scientists, researchers, and even some media --
mostly foreign -- continue to sound the alarm. We are witnesses to the most
egregious war crimes in the history of the world, orchestrated by three mass
murderers, yet we continue to play a deadly game of "Kings-X" with the Pentagon
and the media, primarily cable outlets CNN and Fox News. Until this axis of
corruption admits that DU is a death sentence to all who come in contact with it
-- a crime against both God and man -- apparently we are not "allowed" to speak
out. Wouldn't be prudent...
The term, "Depleted Uranium," sounds
innocuous, even weak. Actually, DU is radioactive waste left over from
manufacturing nuclear fuel and bombs. It is anything but "weak." DU is 1.7 times
heavier than lead and boasts a half-life of 4-1/2 billion years. It never goes
away. The US has more than 10 million tons of DU -- an abundant nuclear-waste
product which is given free to weapons manufacturers who make a tidy profit on
their genocidal bullets and bombs.
In a March 9 report, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat,
former Chief of the Naval Staff, India, writes, "DU burns intensely and is very
hard. It releases Uranium Oxide. The aerosol contains particles of 0.5-5 microns
in size, once they are in the air or dust they are inhaled or ingested,
including from contaminated soil. Once in the lungs one such particle is equivalent to having one X-Ray
per hour, for life. (emphasis added) Because it is impossible to remove,
the victim is gradually irradiated. Still births, birth defects, leukemia,
damaged central nervous systems and other cancers have been common in children
born since 1991."
Getting the attention of the American people is, for
the most part, a futile exercise -- like screaming into the wind. One wonders
how many birth defects, such as babies born
with no internal organs, fused organs, no brains, no eyes in empty sockets, will
it take before Americans join their international counterparts and cry,
"Enough!" When will we realize we are the terrorists, and our *weapon of mass destruction is Depleted
Uranium?
No one has screamed louder or longer than Dr. Doug Rokke,
former Major and health physicist for the US Army. Rokke, the Army's nuclear
expert, was sent to Iraq after Gulf War I to salvage tanks contaminated by DU.
He admits he went into the project "with the total intent to ensure they could
use uranium munitions in war," but says what he and his team of 100 found there
cost one-third of them their lives, cost Rokke his job because he refused to
remain silent about his discovery, and continues to wreak havoc with the team's
health, the health of millions of civilians in the Gulf, and the health of
hundreds of thousands of Gulf War I, and now Gulf War II, veterans.
"We
can't do it," Rokke says fervently. "We can't keep sending our citizens into
that toxic mess. It's a crime against God. It's a crime against humanity to use
uranium munitions in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the consequences..."
Rokke's conclusion is that DU must be banned from the planet, for
eternity, and medical care be provided for everyone, not just the US or the
Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for citizens from
Afghanistan and Iraq to Kosovo and Okinawa to Maryland and Indiana, and other US
states where DU munitions are tested.
For Americans to remain silent as
Bush hands down death sentences for their children and their unborn
grandchildren is a war crime in itself. Arthur Bernklau, executive director of
Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York cites a study done by
eminent scientist Leuren Moret which names DU as the definitive cause of Gulf
War Syndrome. Bernklau says of the 580,400 US Gulf War I soldiers, 11,000 are
now dead. By the year 2000, when Bush and his draft-dodging warmongers were
already planning Gulf War II, there were 325,000 military personnel on permanent
medical disability. Currently, more than half of those who served in Gulf War I
have pemanent medical problems.
This scandal is threatening to erupt,
even as US officials continue to deny there are any long-lasting effects from DU
radiation. Bernklau believes the Moret study may
be the reason behind Veterans Administration Secretary Anthony Principi's recent
and sudden departure. Bernklau says Principi was "aware that DU was causing
illness and death as far back as 2000. He and the Bush administration has (sic)
been hiding these facts, but now, thanks to Moret's report, is far too big to
hide or to cover up."
Moret works tirelessly on the issue of depleted
uranium and its effects upon the planet and its inhabitants, especially
children. She wrote the Forword to Discounted
Casualties:The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium, by Hiroshima journalist
Akira Tashiro. The book can be read online, and should be required
reading for all Americans, especially those who still possess half sense and one
eye.
Moret says the use of DU by the United States defies all
international treaties, and will slowly annihilate all species on earth,
including the human species. She describes DU as "the Trojan Horse" of nuclear
war -- the weapon that keeps on killing for billions of years." There's no way
to turn DU off. There's no way to clean it up.
Because we are Americans,
it is not acceptable that our bloodthirsty leaders be allowed to continue to
rain DU down upon the world with full knowledge of its destructive potential. We
cannot allow Bush to continue to kill our children -- our unborn children -- as
he whips up new candidates for death in his rollicking "scavenger hunt for
terror."
It's time we stopped it.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma freelance writer and a
former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor
for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net. © 2005 Sheila Samples
*See US Code, Title 50,
Chapter 40, Section 2302 -- "The term "weapon of mass destructon" means any
weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or
serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release,
dissemination, or impact of (A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their
precursors, (B) a disease organism, or (C) radiation or
radioactivity."
