jimstaro's blog

January 11, 2011 - ELIZABETH JACKSON: It was called America's Secret War.

From 1964 and 1973, the US dropped 260 million cluster submunitions on Laos in a covert mission to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines.

Not only did the mission fail ... it left a deadly legacy; 80 million unexploded bombs scattered across the Laos countryside.

The bombs have killed or maimed more than 20,000 people since the war ended and they're a major obstacle to economic development in one of Asia's poorest nations.

This year, Australia signed a new international treaty banning the use of cluster bombs.

A Senate committee is currently considering a bill to ratify the treaty but critics say the bill doesn't go far enough to help end the scourge of cluster munitions.

Our very own well protected and connected Criminal International Terrorist, protected in this Country for Decades, finally we may just find out more, finally!

THE CIA FILE ON LUIS POSADA CARRILES

A FORMER AGENCY ASSET GOES ON TRIAL IN THE U.S National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 334

AFGHANISTAN: Call for help for IDPs, deportees in Helmand

10 January 2011 (IRIN) - Thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from insurgency-hit Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, need food assistance urgently, officials told IRIN.

About 900 displaced families in the provincial capital Lashkargah have little or no means to feed themselves and their children this winter, according to Ghulam Farouq Noorzai, director of Helmand’s refugees and returnee affairs department.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) confirmed that of the 3,800 families displaced from Nad Ali and Marjah districts during a major counterinsurgency operation in February 2010, about 900 (300 from Nad Ali and 600 from Marjah) still remain in Lashkargah.

Jan 9, 2011 - Author and journalist Nir Rosen has written a book titled "Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World" which provides an in depth look at the consequences of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Press TV interviewed Nir Rosen regarding his views on the US-led Iraq and Afghan invasions and his travel experiences in both countries.

 

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — January 7, 2011 - Twenty servicemen from New York City whose bodies have gone unclaimed for months or longer will receive full military honors at national veterans cemetery service.

The mass service will be held Saturday at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island. The Department of Veterans Affairs says it’s the largest of it kind in U.S. history.

It’s part of a national initiative in recent years to clear a massive backlog of unburied or unclaimed remains of both veterans and non-veterans.

A mess of wires and worn switches is seen at an electrical generator business in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad. Many Iraqis rely on such ad hoc generator stations to power their daily lives.

01/07/2011 - Iraq finally has a new government after months of deadlock, but the cynical horsetrading has damaged the image of politics. Residents of Baghdad no longer trust their fellow citizens and have withdrawn into private life. They pray that a civil war will not break out.

And does Anyone hear these patriotic constitution readers, or any of their supporters, even mention their wars of choice or the veterans and families of?!?!

Army efforts don't stem Fort Hood suicides

6 January 2010 - The Army's largest post saw a record-high number of soldiers kill themselves in 2010 despite a mental health effort aimed at reversing the trend.

The Army says 22 soldiers have either killed themselves or are suspected of doing so last year at its post at Fort Hood in Texas, twice the number from 2009.

That is a rate of 47 deaths per 100,000, compared with a 20-per-100,000 rate among civilians in the same age group and a 22-per-100,000 rate Army-wide.

Photo: Contributor/IRIN: A displaced family in a camp erected in an orchard in Diyala province, about 90 km east of Baghdad (file photo)

5 January 2011 - Iraq’s new government plans to tackle internal displacement and closely monitor and assist Iraqi refugees abroad, the country’s newly appointed migration and displacement minister said on 3 January.

While we've known about this now for years, rarely reported on by the media, the cable, like the growing list of proof of Gulf War One to Operation Iraqi Freedom, is now out of the dark and into the light of day.

A message from Veterans for Common Sense about the cable:

January 3, 2011 - After a long year of watching the slow death of her husband, Army Sgt. William McKenna, Dina McKenna decided the final goodbye should be dignified without painful lingering.

 

snip

He was deployed in 2003 and was awarded several awards and medals during two tours in Iraq. It was there he breathed fumes from burning garbage pits outside of the military bases - leading to his fatal cancer, his wife believes.

Don't deny detainees their day in court

Indefinite detention of post-Sept. 11 detainees without charge or trial is not the American way.

January 4, 2011 - The idea that every person deserves his or her "day in court" is a fundamental principle in the United States and many countries worldwide. Yet more than nine years after 9/11, the United States remains paralyzed not just about how to give the thousands of detainees in U.S. custody around the world their day in court but about whether to give them that day in court.

Reflections of war on display

January 4, 2011 - A mural that commemorates civilian casualties that happened during the Afghanistan war is currently on display at Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum.

“Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan” opened at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum on December 9 and will remain on display through January 30. Before making it to New York, it had made its debut at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Meeting House.

The Village Where the Neo-Nazis Rule

01/03/2011 - Hitler salutes in the street and firing practice in the forest: Neo-Nazis have taken over an entire village in Germany, and authorities appear to have given up efforts to combat the problem. The place has come to symbolize the far right's growing influence in parts of the former communist east.

Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer have been working on their life's dream for six years, renovating a house in the woods near Jamel, a tiny village near Wismar in the far northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Birgit Lohmeyer writes crime novels, her husband is a musician, and both try to pretend everything is normal here in Jamel.

How Deadly Weapons Continue to Rule Daily Life

Tread carefully In Xieng Khouang, a mother steadies her son as he walks along a rusted bomb casing. Arantxa Cedillo for TIME

Dec. 31, 2010 - At the Vienthong primary school in Laos' Xieng Khouang province, six students take out hand puppets made from clothing scraps and colored felt. Their audience — a class of around 15 children ages 3 to 5 — sits in a semicircle in a darkened classroom as the young puppeteers begin the show.

Notice the No Mention of the Wars of Choice especially by the incoming pols and real noticeable as to those so called outraged teabaggers their supporters and their corporate financed talking heads and cable TV outlet!!

Military kids taking more psychiatric drugs

Prescriptions increase as families struggle with repeated deployments

Mitch Green: From left, Zach Radenz, Army Lt. Col. Blaine Radenz, Tricia Radenz and James Radenz stand in the room where Daniel Radenz, then 12, took his life in June 2009. The room has since been converted into a den.

Defending Khadr shows Edmonton's mettle

January 2, 2011 - In a coffee shop near the provincial museum, Edmonton lawyer Dennis Edney let his cup of java get cold.

He was too busy describing Guantanamo Bay military prison and his meeting with a very controversial client, Canadian Omar Khadr, silent and in chains.

As we talked, Edney watched the e-mail on his BlackBerry. He paused to read another message attacking him for defending "that terrorist." Edney couldn't resist responding. He has turned around a lot of critics by explaining the need to fight for the right to a fair trial, he said.

Surprised? Not!! Revisionist history as to War is a constant, can't ruin the upward movement of ranking officers, their military futures and possible comfortable, and highly profitable, retirements after in the defense industry, politics and other! After all they're not in the fire-base's, running the wars from miles away and in these modern times thousands of miles away!

A Conversation With Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Alejandro Beutel

Dec 27th, 2010 - Not since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 has the fear and loathing of Muslims been as virulent, as widespread among Americans, and as close to morphing from hateful rhetoric into life-threatening violence.

Back on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 I posted this VVAW Anniversary-Dec 26th 1971-Statue of Liberty, Liberation on my first blog, still in my infancy of blog posting but I had gotten better, like embedding links etc.. This action took place only months after I returned from Vietnam, my last year of my four, and getting discharged back into civilian life. I wasn't with these brothers but I had already started down the path of activism against Wars of Choice and those that create them for profit and power. That post is below slightly refined and updated, had to find a link and embedded a document pdf player.

US trauma treatment center assists Iraqi refugees

Dec 23, 2010 - Ekhlas Gorgees kept her composure as she recounted the horrific traumas she and her family endured in Iraq.

She calmly recalled how her husband was severely wounded after a bomb exploded outside of his Baghdad plumbing shop, how she was threatened at gunpoint while walking home from church and how her family tried to escape north to the city of Mosul just before a bloody attack on civilians sent them fleeing back to the capital. It wasn't until later when she talked about the difficulty of leaving her homeland that the tears came.

"We are the native people of Iraq - it's hard for us to leave our native country," she said through an interpreter. "The hope - even now - is to go back to my country."

Every action has a reaction, every destructive action has destructive reactions!

This report is just a part of the legacy we've left to an entire small Country of innocent people, as well as their neighboring countries, whose doctoral leader was under our thumb, right up till his hanging, as to the policies of that whole region we push in the names of Freedoms and Democracy!

The damage done over the previous decade, the pandora's box destroyed, the tens of thousands killed and maimed, the millions turned into refugee's within and running to escape, the children who've grown up in the destruction and death around them, the now selective cleansing of once neighbors and friends.

It isn't only the war of choice that has reaped the damage but the hate, and fear, rhetoric coming from within our country as well as from others who also use it to control their own, now a decade of it as it continues.

‘Muslim terrorist’ on Air Malta plane turns out to be Caribbean Christian

24 December 2010 - The story that made the rounds of the world that a Muslim man was apprehended on an Air Malta plane when he persisted in praying out aloud in the aisle just as the plane was taxying to take off at London’s Heathrow Airport, now has to be revised.

It was a Caribbean Christian man, Maria Busuttil who was on the plane with him, told The Times. And the prayer he was chanting was the ‘Our Father’.

Yet even yesterday on In-Nazzjon, Brian Grech who had a hand in restraining the man, still insisted the man was an Arab Muslim.

Writing on The Times comment pages yesterday, Ahmed Sain wrote: “For all of you who made a comment yesterday on this subject, I think you got it all wrong regarding this man’s religion. Now you guys ask for forgiveness.”

Japanese Politician Wants to Accelerate Investigation into Iraq War

December 24, 2010 - TOKYO- (PanOrient News) A group of lawmakers from all of Japan's political parties – with the notable exception of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and its former government allies New Komeito – have established a committee to investigate Japan's involvement in the Iraq War and is asking the government of Prime Minister Naoto Kan to "accelerate the investigation progress."

Tsuyoshi Saito, the chairman of the committee and a member of the House of Representatives for the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, told PanOrient News that his group submitted numerous requests to the government earlier this month after it had held its first formal meeting.

Otto Reich /Elliott Abrams /John Poindexter/Edwin Meese George H.W. Bush/Casper Weinberger/Oliver North/Robert McFarlane

December 24, 1992 - President George Herbert Walker Bush pardoned six Reagan administration appointees in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Robert McFarlane, the President’s former national security advisor.

He did so with less than one month to go in his presidency, and one week before Weinberger’s trial on four felony charges was to begin.

These people and others were responsible for selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran in hope of the release of hostages held in Lebanon, despite then-Pres. Ronald Reagan’s repeated pledge not to negotiate with hostage-takers.

Billions have been spent on these Wars of choice! With those Billions spent Billions were made by many, new multi-millionaires with connections were produced as well as a high priced merc private army and more. Directly and indirectly over the decade of these ongoing conflicts!

With the Wars came Tax Cuts that were recently extended, especially for the Wealthy who received the bulk of added to the write offs they already received for business, investment and personal!

During the last decade, the recent political campaigns, the so called debate on tax cut extensions nor in public comments, did anyone, the politicians, those wealthy, the power brokers, wall street, talking heads, media, the so called outraged tea party .........., Demand the Country 'Sacrifice' as those who serve and are sent, as well as their families, do and are the only ones, many now as veterans of for the rest of their lives! And the wars continue!

Taxpayers Paying Torture Contractors' Legal Bills

Dec. 17, 2010 - Taxpayers are currently paying the legal bills for Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two CIA contractors who reportedly helped plan and execute the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" program, the Associated Press' Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported Thursday night. The CIA agreed to pay up to $5 million to cover legal fees for the two men—far more than the standard amount that would be covered for employees of the agency (during the Bush administration, it was standard practice for CIA officers to pay half of the cost of insuring themselves against possible legal action).

New Program Speeds Approval for Vietnam Veterans

WASHINGTON – December 17, 2010 - The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has decided more than 28,000 claims in the first six weeks of processing disability compensation applications from Vietnam Veterans with diseases related to exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange.

“With new technology and ongoing improvements, we are quickly removing roadblocks to processing benefits,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki. “We are also conducting significant outreach to Vietnam Veterans to encourage them to submit their completed application for this long-awaited benefit.”

Italy adds to Americans' sentences in CIA grab

December 16 2010 - An Italian appeals court Wednesday increased the sentences against 23 Americans convicted in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect involved in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program.

In upholding the convictions, the court added one year to the eight-year term handed down to former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady and two years onto the five-year terms given to 22 other Americans convicted along with him, defense lawyers said.

They were never in Italian custody and were tried and convicted in absentia. But they risk arrest if they travel to Europe as long as the convictions stand. {continued}