Another Powerful Video

From Dick Eats Bush

Video: RIGHT NOW

Darfur On 60 Minutes. Sunday!!

Seventeen years ago I fled Darfur.
But not a day goes by when I don’t think of my family and friends who remain in the region – along with the millions of other Darfuris currently suffering at the hands of a genocidal regime.
Yet, despite the devastation, we must not give up hope. There is something we can do to stop this genocide. It begins with raising awareness to help build pressure on our political leaders to act.
That is why I am so pleased to tell you that this Sunday evening the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” will air a story about the genocide in Darfur.
Click here to read more about the segment and to check local television listings.
The Sudanese government continues to deny its role in the perpetration of genocide, restricting reporters from entering the region in order to hide the truth.
Yet CBS correspondent Scott Pelley and his "60 Minutes" crew went anyway, putting their lives in jeopardy. Their report on what is happening is both powerful and devastating.
I know because I was with Pelley and his crew when they filmed this piece. It is haunting and evocative – because it is real. There is no doubt in my mind that after watching this segment, millions of Americans will be compelled to act to stop the genocide in Darfur.
Click here to ask your friends and family to join you in watching "60 Minutes" this Sunday.
Thank you for everything you continue to do.
Sincerely,
Omer Ismail
Fellow at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
Founder of Darfur Peace and Development Organization

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The Save Darfur Coalition would like to invite you to join our Weekly Action Network and commit to take one action a week to help stop the genocide in Darfur. Will you help turn up the heat? Click here to learn more and sign up to participate.

PTSD - Redeployed

I'm off to work, but had caught the following on CBS News Early Broadcast, this morning.

Troops With Stress Disorders Fit For Duty?

Some Soldiers With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Are Being Re-Deployed To Iraq

Oct. 19, 2006

"To put someone in that situation and say 'face your fears' is contrary to all current medical and scientific knowledge about PTSD."

(CBS) Army Staff Sgt. Bryce Syverson spent 15 months in Iraq before he was diagnosed by military doctors with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sent to the psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Medical Center, CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reports.

"It ended up they just took his weapon away from him and said he was non-deployable and couldn’t have a weapon," says his father, Larry Syverson. "He was on suicide watch in a lockdown."

That was last August. This August, he was deployed to Ramadi, in the heart of the Sunni triangle — and he had a weapon.

You can view the Report HERE

We are creating our own 'Human' WMD's as these Troops without Proper Treatment, after Multiple Tours, and Already Diagnosed with PTSD are sent back into Theater! They will, and are, ticking timebombs, through No Fault Of Their Own, to Explode on those around them!!

I had a few friends who after returning from 'Nam couldn't handle living, once again, in a semi stable society. So they volunteered to return to the War Theater, Where They Were Killed!! As well as others who turned to Drugs and Alcohol, and there are others who turned to crime or committed Violent Acts when their Demons Took Over!!

We here the reports, than flip it out of mind, while we Should Be Studying this, because it not only happens to Military Personal and Civilians in War Theaters, it can happen to Anyone who goes through Tramatic Experiances in life that shake their perceived foundations!

Bring Them Home

By Pete Seeger

Protest music has been around for thousands of years. It just leaks out every so often and helps make history.

A group of young people and not-so-young people have gotten together to sing one of my songs that I wrote around 1965 about the Vietnam War. And they've done what I did a few years ago; they're singing it about the situation in Iraq. "Bring 'em Home!"

You can watch them singing and share it with your friends right here


What they are saying is we need to send the politicians a message in a language they understand: election day votes. Here in New York, voting on the Working Families line is the best way to tell the politicians, bring them home, bring them home.

We're in a very dangerous situation. The problems in the Middle East are not going away — they're getting worse. Churchill said, anybody who thinks, when they get into a war, that they know what's going to happen, is fooling themselves. With all the power that the American military establishment has, they still cannot predict all the things that are going to happen.

To quote Martin Luther King, the weakness of violence is that it always creates more violence. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.

That's the message at the end of the song, "the world needs teachers, books and schools . . . And learning a few universal rules." I'm glad they left that verse in.

Watch the video and then pass it on


There's a saying from William James a young friend painted on my barn. It goes: "I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for all those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual . . . like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride."

Apply this to the current situation: Take this email and forward it to your friends and family. Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.

We need to spread this message. Back in the sixties, I'd go from college to college to college singing songs. That's how folk songs were shared. Sure, some person who thought it was an unpatriotic song might boo, but a few seconds later he'd be drowned out by a few thousands voices who started cheering enthusiastically. Made the poor guy start thinking.

Change comes through small organizations. You divide up the jobs: Some people sing bass, some sing soprano. Some copy the sheet music, others drive and pick up those who ride the subway. You take small steps. They all add up.

Take a small step today. Here's your part: Tell your family and your friends about what we can do to send a message to the politicians to bring our troops home. And then vote on election day.

The very worst thing is for people to say: "My vote doesn't count. So why bother to vote at all?" Our votes do count. And if we vote to bring the troops home, they count even more.

Let's bring them home


In solidarity,

Pete Seeger

IAVA Action Fund

Sure, your Senators and Representatives say they support the troops. But do their votes match their rhetoric? There's only one way to know for sure.
Click here to see your legislators' official IAVA Congressional Rating.
We've tallied up every Congressional vote cast on IAVA issues (from armor to VA funding) for the last five years, crunched the numbers, and given every legislator a letter grade - the IAVA Congressional Rating.
Did your Senator get an A or an F? Click here to find out.

Life After Death

Jan Berry

I don’t know about an afterlife, but surviving death is a hell of an
experience. It’s also tough to write about. What’s worked best for me is
poetry. My poems are indebted to reading other poets who explore the
depths of life after death. Such poems help me find ways to deal with, and
write about, my own life. Hopefully, their insights offer inspiration and
solace for others, as well.

I’m currently reading and rereading W.D. Ehrhart’s Sleeping with the
Dead (Adastra Press, $14) and Charles H. Johnson’s Sam’s Place
(Warthog Press, $15). I admire how their poetry tackles harsh experiences.
Many of the poems in these new collections revolve around living with
death’s unrelenting presence, carried home like an eternal wound from the
war in Vietnam.

Bill Ehrhart and I produced, with other poets, early anthologies of poetry
by Vietnam veterans. He has since written and edited a thick stack of
books on the war where he became a veteran still too young to buy a beer.
A high school history and English teacher, his books are dedicated to Anne
and Leela, his wife and daughter. Yet happiness for war veterans often
masks horrific memories, as he writes in “All About Death”:

It won’t go away. Death creeps up on you
when you’re least expecting it, even when
you can see it coming a mile away,
and rips your heart out through your throat and leaves
an empty space in your life you can’t fill...

He shows us death stalking, infliction upon infliction, a friend who was a
field hospital nurse, where so many soldiers died of wounds beyond
healing. In “Home Before Morning” he mourns that in her failing health,
she’s still tortured by war’s wreckage:

you just kept hoping, struggling to go on
another day, another month, another year…

[you] call me late at night to say you’re frightened
and you need to hear another voice who’s
frightened by the posturing of presidents

and statesmen who have never heard the sound
of teenaged soldiers crying for their mothers…

The solution, he suggests in the title poem, “Sleeping with the Dead,” is
to love, even when it doesn’t last:

O, to have been
so close, to have shared your bed, to have
felt like I’d been raised from the dead
after all those dead I slept with
every night. It almost drove me mad
to let you go…

Charles Johnson and I share a fond regard for poetry venues in New Jersey.
In Sam’s Place, named after a cozy tavern run by a tight-lipped
veteran of World War II, he invites us to lean closer to hear a bar room
story of his life—from a slap-happy college student to combat-obsessed
soldier, to finally a tax-paying citizen upset by the latest news and
haunted by echoes of war:

I listen to the past at an empty
children’s play park. I made it home
to hear an echo in the woods.

It sounds so close.
It always sounds so close.

War never fades away. Battle explosions erupt in suburban woods, while at
home the TV forecasts future explosions, triggering anguish over the
coming war:

Talk of another war is clouding minds
and I can’t think of anything
except how to juggle this month’s bills…

Young men and women may be sent to war
and all I can think of is a credit rating
and how I sold my soul for a peace
that never seems to come to mind…

By reaching out to others, he finds a solution to his disillusion. He
teaches poetry workshops, spreads the news as a newspaper editor and
savors life with his wife, Lainey. In deliberate contrast to his sense of
estrangement when he came home from Vietnam, he warmly puts out the
welcome mat, as in “Homebound”:

I wanted to be with you
on your return flight…

When you arrived I was waiting.
Not on the ground
but in your head—to remind you
every landing means you’ve made it home.

For more information: W D Ehrhart; Charles H Johnson, Poet

RiverBend, Back Posting!!!

Baghdad Burning


... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The Lancet Study...

This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.

"My Name Is Rachel Corrie"

Rachel Corrie Memorial Site

* ³My Name is Rachel Corrie² Opens in New York *

³My Name is Rachel Corrie² ­ a play based on the life of the late US peace
activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer - was scheduled to open last
March at the New York Theatre Workshop. But six weeks before opening night,
the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing the production. The
move that was widely criticized as an act of censorship. On Sunday, the play
finally opened at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York. We play exclusive
excerpts of the play, and speak with Rachel Corrie¹s father, Craig; her
sister, Sarah; and the play¹s co-editor, Katharine Viner.

Listen/Watch/Read

**********
**********

* Oscar-Winning Actor Vanessa Redgrave to Present International Human Rights Award to Extraordinary Rendition Survivor Maher Arar *

Tonight, the Institute for Policy Studies will award its International Human
Rights Award to extraordinary rendition survivor Maher Arar. In 2002, Arar,
a Canadian citizen, was falsely accused of terrorist links and handed over
to Syrian authorities where he spent nearly a year enduring brutal torture.
Just last month the Canadian government exonerated Arar and criticized both
Canadian and US officials for his ordeal. Maher Arar¹s Human Rights award
will be presented by Oscar award-winning actor Vanessa Redgrave.

Listen/Watch/Read

Arlington East

Arlington East on Cape Cod National Seashore

The Cape Codders for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, and the Veterans for Peace installed the first Arlington East on Coast Guard Beach on the Cape Cod National Seashore in Eastham, MA yesterday. It was a perfect New England Indian summer day.

Veterans from the WW II. Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars came from all over the country to help us build this memorial for those who have died in the Iraq war. Code Pink members from all over MA were there. Veterans For Peace chapters from NY, ME, NH and RI were there. This is not a complete list; I was kinda busy working on the exhibit & did not have the chance to talk to everyone.

There are more photo's and the rest of the writeup at link above.

"JUST SAY NO"

I just posted up another Flash Video that you can view here.



"Just Say NO" was sent as a cassette all over the world. It was hidden by soldiers in their baggage who were enroute to the Gulf War in 1991 and secretly distributed there. It even made it's way to George Bush's daddy's presidential desk. 'Stop The War Brigade'.


Visit HERE for a posting I have up with the lyrics of the song along with a recent letter sent to Tom at 'GI Special' and posted in that Newsletter from the 'Stop The War Brigade'. The links below are also with my posting or you can visit them from here, after viewing the video.

Stop The War Brigade

Darnell Stephen Summers GI Talk - Video

Deep Dish TV 55 "Just Say No"

WAR OF THE WORDS - Story of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders

Check back each Thursday between now and the election for another exciting chapter
click pic

As Eric {always on the ball, catching these}, over at BUSHFLASH. where I found this, puts it:

EXCELLENT flash film about the origins and practices of the right-wing blogosphere (new episodes added regularly!)

First Episode Up:

1. The Drums Of War (6:50)

Second Episode Up:

2. Mission Accomplished (5:52)

Coming Episodes:

3. Well, Not Accomplished Exactly, So Much As - Look, Just Shut Up, Okay?

coming October 19th

4. Democracy Threatens

coming October 26th

5. Clear Skies Ahead

coming November 2nd

Here's hoping this Documentary, when finished, is than offered to the general public as the Historical Document it should be, Viewed Widely, with Lessons Learned for future generations!!

Thus 'Finally' shutting down the 'Fanaticism' and 'Rot' of  the Fear, Racism, Hatreds, Falsh Religious Ideologies, and that list grows, that some in this Society attempt to force on us all!!

Honoring The Fallen

A flag-draped casket. Rifle volleys. Taps.


by forkush
Tue Oct 17, 2006 at 03:36:25 AM EDT



The Rocky Mountain News has a brilliant and incredibly moving flash video {This is a Must See-JS} about fallen Marines and the camaraderie and love shown by their brothers in arms. It documents the work of Marine Corps Major Steve Beck, who notifies families of the deaths of their loved ones, and comforts family members. The print version of Final Salute won the Pulitzer prize.
In the photo above, the Major spread a blanket and stood sentry, so a Marine's wife could spend her last night with her husband, sleeping next to his casket.
Last week, the author, photographer, editor, and Major Beck were invited to the University of Kansas School of Journalism, where author Jim Sheeler read aloud from the article to a sobbing audience. Here is how it begins:

Inside a limousine parked on the airport tarmac, Katherine Cathey looked out at the clear night sky and felt a kick.
"He's moving," she said. "Come feel him. He's moving."
Her two best friends leaned forward on the soft leather seats and put their hands on her stomach.
"I felt it," one of them said. "I felt it."
Outside, the whine of jet engines swelled.
"Oh, sweetie," her friend said. "I think this is his plane."
As the three young women peered through the tinted windows, Katherine squeezed a set of dog tags stamped with the same name as her unborn son:
James J. Cathey.
"He wasn't supposed to come home this way," she said, tightening her grip on the tags, which were linked by a necklace to her husband's wedding ring.
The women looked through the back window. Then the 23-year-old placed her hand on her pregnant belly.
"Everything that made me happy is on that plane," she said.

Major Beck convinced the journalists that the story couldn't just be written in a few weeks, and ultimately, they spent a year on the project. Even though the resulting article was tasteful and moving, the Major received flack from his chain of command for granting so much access. But he trusted the writer and photographer to tell the story.

The two journalists have continued to follow the families they profiled -- including documenting the birth of a child whose Marine father had died in Iraq -- and invited the families to the newsroom on the day the Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The families spoke after the Pulitzer victory was announced and brought most in the newsroom to tears, Temple said.

*****

And a Quote borrowed from another KOS Diary:
You will be remembered not for your efforts in that bleak place that took your life ... but the waking of our nation, causing the reflection and redefinement of what we are to be, and ultimately the liberation of your fellow citizens. Indeed you died for our freedom and it IS a victory worthy of your names.
by FL16Dem on Mon Oct 16, 2006
*****

This is a Silent Honor Roll shown on the PBS 'News Hour', now Almost Daily, that was started at the Beginning!

As of Today, 10-17-06 there are 64 Pages with 5 'Honor Roll' links per page!

If you take the Time to View 'ALL' the Pages/Photo's and Information Instill This Thought Into Each American Military Face You See, 'Try and Picture 30, 40, 50, 60 or More Iraqi Faces, Children-Women-Men, Killed for Each Of These Faces You Are Looking At', never forget the Innocent!

TAKE IT BACK

You can watch this Video HERE

53 KIA's ALREADY THIS MONTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

* Scott Ritter on "Target Iran: The Truth About the White House¹s Plans for
Regime Change² *

Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter: ³The path that the United States
is currently embarked on regarding Iran is a path that will inevitably lead
to war. Such a course of action will make even the historical mistake we
made in Iraq pale by comparison.² Listen/Watch/Read

The Great Experiment

IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?
Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom".

Five Americans Killed in Iraq, Month's Toll Now 53

Two marines were killed by insurgents in Anbar Province on Sunday, the American military command said, and three American soldiers died a day earlier in a bombing in southern Baghdad, bringing the total of American troop deaths in Iraq this month to at least 53, an extraordinarily high midmonth tally.

It's Bush Sr. vs Bush Jr. in Allen Race

The Democratic candidate is basically siding with elements of the elder Bush’s political entourage in an effort to extricate Junior from the mess he got himself into. So, in one sense, the Virginia Senate race pits old man Bush against his eldest son.

Soldiers Salute UK General

"...I am thoroughly heartened by this and have the beginings [sic] of a thaw in the cynicism which has dogged my service thinking since 2003," admits Jim_P_Pulfrew.

You can read the rest at Times Online with emmbedded link to the responses.

Learning to be an 'Empty' Talking Head

*****

DON'T GO

This is a story of the reality, when one invades anothers country, and being sent there by those who don't face that reality!




ONCE YOUTH REFUSES TO SLAUGHTER

AND BE SLAUGHTERED, HOSTILE

NATIONS MUST ABANDON THIS MAD

DESTRUCTION AND COME TO REASON.

Visit the Don't Go Site Here

The site page also has links to a pdf version of the Text and Graphics for copying and distribution.

Bring up the QuickTime Movie Flash directly Here - 'DON'T GO'