For Davidson students, war gets a face
Davidson College is a liberal arts institution founded in 1837 by ministers of the Concord Presbytery. Its 1,700 students come from almost every state in the nation and many foreign countries. A highly selective admission process brings students who are proven scholars and leaders to a close campus community in the small town of Davidson, North Carolina.
Davidson is just west of where I'm at, at present, and north of Chalotte NC. In a nice little small town with a friendly village type atmosphere.
Session at college airs Iraqis' frustration, conflicts on what to do
Four years into the Iraq war, a group of students from the University of Baghdad talked Thursday via television to students at Davidson College, more than 8,000 miles away.
The Iraqi students told their counterparts that they're angry about the conflict and most don't believe life has gotten better for them.
This is what needed to be done long ago, dialog as in diplomacy, and certainly not from those we should expect it to come from, our present administration nor the congresses in power till recently. For right from the beginning we found out quickly that those who we hired had no use for diplomacy, they wanted to use the power of the military and their overinflated ego's to force their ideologies unto others as well as the sense of fear to force same on us. This started right out of the gate and well before 9/11.
Davidson and Iraqi Students Share Frustrations Via Videoconference
Safe and sound in America, Davidson students heard anger, cries for help, and confusion over the best way forward from peers in Baghdad on Thursday morning, May 10.
Four Years Later: U.S. and Iraqi Students Re-Engage
The Iraqi participants gathered in the relative safety of Baghdad’s Intercontinental Hotel. One Iraqi student said he lives every day fearfully, noting that a suicide murderer killed seventy students on the University of Baghdad campus recently.
The Iraqis all spoke English well, and appeared to be graduate students in language, medicine, law, English, and communications.
Zogby concluded, “This group of students seemed to be just as ambivalent as all of us. They didn’t really know what they wanted the U.S. to do. We’ve unleashed a situation there that’s caused trauma on all fronts.”
Zogby will use an hour-long edited version of the exchange as the May 18 edition of the weekly “Viewpoint” talk show that he hosts for Abu Dhabi Television. It will air in North America at 5 p.m. EDT on ADTV and LinkTV satellite channels.
While I didn't attend this exchange the clips I've seen show this would be a must see for much more than the channels already listed to show it. Channels such as Sundance or better yet PBS, at a time that as many as possible can view, not late at night. I would suggest others to contact your local affiliates or the channels main offices to request that they place this on their schedules, in the near term.
To carry the student, or at least of that generation, theme further, if you haven't found or visited the following site you should. Many of us follow the few bloggers coming out of Iraq or Iraqi's living in excile. This is one more great site to see and learn the Iraqi perspective of what we have wrought upon them.
Hometown Baghdad
An ongoing documentary web series following the lives of a few Iraqi 20-somethings trying to survive in Baghdad.
New episodes every
Monday, Wednesday
and Friday.
Just one of their recent video's.
"Security" - Hometown Baghdad
The everyday life of the Iraqi citizen has been the great untold story of the Iraq war.
The Language
The intention of the Iraqi filmmakers and subjects was to show the world what Baghdad is truly like. That's why they usually speak English and not Arabic.
Dialog and Diplomacy, with everyone in the region, are needed but may be coming way too late now, for we've crossed the line of attempts to stop any blowback, of criminal terrorism, that may follow, but it can be minimized.
And you might also want to visit Alive In Baghdad and sign up for their newsletter.
Alive in Baghdad was formed to counter the sound-bite driven, “Live From” news model. Through the work of a team of Americans and Iraqi correspondents on the ground, Alive in Baghdad shows the occupation through the voices of Iraqis. Alive in Baghdad brings testimonies from individual Iraqis, footage of daily life in Iraq, and short news segments from Iraq to you.
Prior to our Illegal Invasion of Iraq, after the first Gulf War and during the Sanctions, a number of NGO's were working, not with the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq. They were trying to bring back a semblance of life before the destructive bombings of their country and minimize the suffering and deaths that the sanctions were going to inflict on them, the citizens of Iraq.
While only being Human Beings helping out other Human Beings one of the side effects that always occurs, but not forced upon nor thought of, is winning hearts and minds along with lasting friendships of tolerance and understanding.
You cannot Bomb others into any Ideology and Freedom comes from within ones self, in mind and soul, no matter the Government of ones country.
One of the projects undertaken can be found just below, and there were hundreds of others covering all aspects of anyones society or rebuilding of.
The Iraq Water Project
The Iraq Water Project (IWP) is a project of Veterans for Peace, Inc. (VFP):, a national veterans Peace & Justice organization based in St. Louis, Missouri. Our principal partner in IWP is Life for Relief & Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, and dedicated to alleviating human suffering in Iraq and many other parts of the world.
Thousands of families now have access to clean water.
Prior to the March 2003 US invasion, the Iraq Water Project sent three teams of veterans to Iraq who paid their own expenses and worked alongside the Iraqi laborers repairing water treatment plants. We were then proud to announce that thanks to the IWP six water treatment plants in different cities and provinces of Iraq were once again sending clean drinking water to more than 85.000 people. Read a post-invasion report by our IWP Project Coordinator sent from Iraq in August 2003.
Cooperative actions like above bring the people of this world closer together and struggleing for the same purposes within the differing lifestyles and beliefs. Wars create destructive hatreds and a sense of needed retaliations creating more conflicts!
Below you will find a well written understanding of what was never learned, after this country as a whole stated they must learn the lessons of so we would never repeat. Instead this country went on it's merry way of the denial of and want to never look back at what our government brought on us, and another little country.
The destruction and deaths from aother debacle, untill the present, was the Monumental Failure of Foreign Policy! We not only didn't learn the past we've created an even worse senario of Failed Policies that may just haught us destructively for the coming next few generations!
Had We Learned the Lessons of the Vietnam War, We Never Would Have Invaded Iraq
Camillo “Mac” Bica, a Vietnam Vet and Member of Veteran's For Peace & Veterans For America
Had our political leaders paid closer attention to our experiences fighting the Vietnam War, they would have realized that disenfranchised people would endure tremendous sacrifice and struggle heroically and steadfastly against foreign occupiers and aggressors. Tactically, they would have anticipated the difficulty of fighting a counter insurgency war. How the guerilla/insurgent’s “hit, run, and disappear” tactics not only nullifies the superior weapons technology of the invading/occupying force, but also provides vast war-fighting advantage in concealment, confrontation, intelligence, and communication. They would have foreseen the frustration of fighting an enemy indistinguishable from those we claim to be liberating and protecting and would have understood that the resultant anxiety and stress precipitates a state of conditioned hyper-vigilance and overreaction in which civilian casualties and deaths become the norm rather than the exception. They would have realized that this inevitable “kill them all, let god sort them out” mentality, justified as collateral damage or excused under the rubric of the “fog of war,” abrogates the efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people and increases sympathy and support for the guerillas/insurgents.
You may want to read the whole of what Camillo has written as there are other embedded links. Than make up your own minds. For this generation must not do what happened previous, or it condemns the generations following!
This is what just one person, along with his family, felt compelled to do in the name of Human Kind and for a better World, for War is not the Answer, it's a Condemnation!
Walk To End The Wars
Bill McDannell is a member of San Diego VFP Chapter 91 and he has embarked on a walk across the country in an attempt to end the war and occupation of Iraq.
"My name is Bill McDannell. I am a father of five and grandfather of four. I am a Vietnam era veteran and a former pastor of the United Methodist Church. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, I still firmly believe that, as a citizen of the United States of America, I have a voice in the activities of our country, and that my voice can be heard and can have an impact."
"On Saturday, November 4th, 2006 I began to put that belief to the test. Mindful of my constitutional right to petition my government, on that date I left my home in Lakeside, California to begin a walk that will end in Washington, D.C. I am carrying with me a petition I intend to present to both the executive and legislative branches of our government requesting that we, as a nation, declare an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Sign Bill's petition
For more information on Bill's route
Do Your Thing to End the War
On the flip side, what else has this new century and failed policies brought forth. A quickly growing Mercenary Army and the same quick growth of the needed Support from a Corporate Giant to back up that highly paid Army. Costing us Billions of our Treasury, and those costs growing as quickly as who receives them, with many of those Billions just plain lost!
Lately I've been using the signature Is 'Funding' Really For Troops?
What Happened To Funding and Oversite For Military/Veteran Care In Previous Congresses?.
And saying I want to know Exactly where every dime of any Supplemental War Funding Bill is going!
We had some $439.3 billion fiscal 2007 Department of Defense budget plus the passed Supplemetals of Billions more, and President Bush’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 budget requests $481.4 billion in discretionary authority for the Department of Defense base budget, an 11.3 percent increase over the projected enacted level for FY 2007, for real growth of 8.6 percent; and $141.7 billion to continue the fight in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in FY 2008.
Where is this money going? The Defense Budgets get requested and passed with little or no knowledge of where these Billions are going by any of us who are footing these bills, and many think there's a big bang for the buck, as to National Security, because of these huge budgets. And in the previous congresses nobody seemed to bat an eye at the extra Billions requested for these War Supplementals nor when hearing about Billions that just vanished!
How much is being skimmed off and by whom? I want to know and so should you!
William Rivers Pitt | Two Hearings, One Reality
William Rivers Pitt writes: "Another hearing took place on Capitol Hill yesterday that was truly chilling to observe. Representative John Murtha's (D-Pennsylvania) Subcommittee on Appropriations heard testimony from two investigators whose work has been focused on the phenomenon of private military contractors in Iraq. The first to give testimony was Jeremy Scahill, author of 'Blackwater: Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.' The second witness was Robert Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker who recently released a new film titled 'Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.'"
Some excerpts from testimony:
I remember clearly my interview with Stewart Scott, a former Halliburton employee. With pain and rage in his voice, he asked how dare Halliburton put its people up at five-star hotels while the soldiers, who he was there to help, were sleeping on the ground. I did not believe him at first, but then he began naming the hotels and the locations. It was all true.
Another young Halliburton worker named James Logsdon told me about the burn pits. Burn pits are large dumps near military stations where they would burn equipment, trucks, trash, etc. If they ordered the wrong item, they'd throw it in the burn pit. If a tire blew on a piece of equipment, they'd throw the whole thing into the burn pit. The burn pits had so much equipment they even gave them a nickname: "Home Depot."
Halliburtan is the huge support mechanism for the quickly growing mercenary army known as 'Blackwater'.
Blackwater is an army not covered by anyones Laws, or so it seems. And if that is the case than how does one stop the dangerous and destructive behavior they may be causing. For if they are killing and maiming with no repercussions or accountibility than it makes no differance wether they are 'Private Contractors' or 'Military Personal' because the Blowback from Atrosities places All in the sights of Retaliation for the actions they carried out.
And any attempts at winning hearts and minds are completely Null and Void by any population as the hate grows from within. One simply cannot just forgive and forget for the thousands lost and the destruction that surrounds them!
This video gives one a quick look at who and what 'Blackwater' is:
BLACKWATER: THE SHADOW WAR
If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Bush's Praetorian Guard, paid by YOU the people, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy.
And a brief look at the hearings that should have been held long ago to put reigns on what was occuring In Our Names and on Our Dime!
Author and Democracy Now Correspondent Jeremy Scahill Testifies in Landmark House
Hearing on Defense Contracting
There are over 120,000 private contractors currently deployed in Iraq and
yesterday, a House panel put some of the harshest criticisms of this
privatization of war into the congressional record for the first time.
Democracy Now! correspondent and The Nation magazine investigative reporter
Jeremy Scahill testified before a House Appropriations hearing on defense
contracting. Scahill is author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the
World¹s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Listen/Watch/Read
Was 'Mothers Day' celebrated, as mothers are those who bear and bring to life All Of Us, with the above in mind?
NO!!!
It was as described below and elsewhere brought into being. Many didn't know of the reasons for, but learned rather quickly, especially in these times of repeated destructive history, the Real Meaning Of Mothers Day, not chocolate, flowers and cards, But Peace!!
The Real Mother’s Day Tradition
"Arise then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!" So begins the original Mother's Day proclamation of 1870, written by Julia Ward Howe, who also authored "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as an anti-slavery activist in 1862.
Alfre Woodard explains her motivation to take part in the video and support this Mother's Day renewal: "My mother used to say all the time, ‘I look after people's kids, because one day I know somebody will look after my kids. I feed people's kids, because I know somebody one day will feed my kids.' That informs a lot of who I am as a mother. That I know I'm not only parenting Mavis and Duncan, but I'm responsible for every child that comes through."
"Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace… to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace."
Cole Miller talks about No More Victims
With a message from a Mother and Grandmother sitting in the seats of power as a hired representative of the people.
As A Mother
This Mother's Day, Julia Ward Howe's call is particularly relevant, not just for mothers, but for all women, all men, all daughters, and all sons. We are in the midst of a war that has taken far too many of our most precious resources - our children. It is a war the American people have lost faith in and are ready to end. It is a failed policy, and we are ready for a new direction.
But on this 'Mothers Day' don't only look at your own comfortable surroundings. Look and Think about the Mothers in Iraq and their Precious Children especially!
Look at the children around you and place them in the World those in Iraq, Darfur, Afganistan, Palestine, and the many other trouble area's around the world. Would you want your child living in that 'Hell On Earth', for they are all our children!
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