Veterans Say ‘Burn Pits’ Created Toxic Clouds That Made Them Sick

Senior Airman Frances Gavalis tosses unserviceable uniform items into a burn pit at Balad Air Base, Iraq, in 2008. The military destroyed uniforms, equipment and other materials in huge burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some veterans say those pits are responsible for respiratory problems they are now experiencing. (photo: Senior Airman Julianne Showalter/USAF

 

|Daniel Hajek and Arezou Rezvani | NPR | Reader Supported News | December 18, 2015

n 2008, Army Reserve Capt. LeRoy Torres returned home to Robstown, Texas, after a tour in Iraq. He went back to work as a state trooper with the Texas Highway Patrol.

Torres was a longtime runner. So when a suspect took off on foot one morning, Torres sprinted after him. But something was wrong. A burning sensation in his chest hurt so bad, it almost knocked him down.

“I was able to catch up, but afterwards, my goodness, I remember just — I laid on the ground, I was so exhausted,” Torres says. “One of my buddies said, ‘Man, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Man, I don’t know. I just feel really, really tired — my chest feels really tight. I don’t know.’ I couldn’t catch my breath.”

A few years later, Torres was diagnosed with a rare disease called constrictive bronchiolitis. Scars in his lungs block the flow of air.

Read more

US First Shields Its Torturers and War Criminals From Prosecution, Now Officially Honors Them

The unveiling ceremony came just one day after Human Rights Watch released a scathing report calling for the administration of President Barack Obama to file criminal charges for Bush era CIA torture. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

 

Glenn Greenwald | The Intercept | Reader Supported News | December 5, 2015

s vice president, Dick Cheney was a prime architect of the worldwide torture regime implemented by the U.S. government (which extended far beyond waterboarding), as well as the invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 people and more likely over a million. As such, he is one of the planet’s most notorious war criminals.

President Obama made the decision in early 2009 to block the Justice Department from criminally investigating and prosecuting Cheney and his fellow torturers, as well as to protect them from foreign investigations and even civil liability sought by torture victims. Obama did that notwithstanding a campaign decree that even top Bush officials are subject to the rule of law and, more importantly, notwithstanding a treaty signed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan requiring that all signatory states criminally prosecute their own torturers. Obama’s immunizing Bush-era torturers converted torture from a global taboo and decades-old crime into a reasonable, debatable policy question, which is why so many GOP candidates are now openly suggesting its use.

But now, the Obama administration has moved from legally protecting Bush-era war criminals to honoring and gushing over them in public. Yesterday, the House of Representatives unveiled a marble bust of former Vice President Cheney, which — until a person of conscience vandalizes or destroys it — will reside in Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol.

Read more

 

Nov. 16, 2015: French Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls stand with students at Sorbonne University in Paris. (photo: Reuters/Pool)

 

Marc Ash | Reader Supported News | November 18, 2015

he stated goals of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” followed the traditional path of American war rhetoric. The old standby, market-tested themes of “defending America … fighting for freedom and democracy” were the cornerstones of every argument Bush administration officials presented to the American people in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That was the “made for television version.”

In fact the ideological basis for the War on Terror was set forth in policy statements by the The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s.

PNAC was ostensibly, according to its founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan, a “non-profit educational organization.” To that extent PNAC’s early declarations proved true: an education of sorts was certainly in the offing.

Read more

Bernie Sanders: World is paying the price today for the ‘tough, but stupid’ policies of Cheney and Bush

Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT-I) speaking in Cleveland – YouTube

 

 

Tom Boggioni | Raw Story | November 17, 2015

In a speech in Cleveland Monday night, 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders ripped the administration of  former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for destabilizing the Middle East with their “tough, but stupid” policies following 9/11.

After rapping the head of the Republican National Committee for calling current President Barack Obama “weak” in the fight against ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks, Sanders invoked the memory of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11.

“You remember President Bush, ” he asked rhetorically. “He was very very tough, but not very smart. He and Dick Cheney and the whole lot of them, they were tough! And they said ‘we should invade Iraq.’ We should do it virtually alone and the result was 6,700 brave men and women from our country dead, hundreds of thousands of our best young people coming home with injuries — physical and emotional. Many many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded. Huge instability in the entire region, and we are paying the price today for that instability and chaos.”

“So I say to my Republican colleagues,” he continued.”Yeah, we have got to be tough, but not stupid.”

Read more

George H. W. Bush On Gay Marriage: People Have A Right To Be Happy

Carlos Santoscoy | On Top Magazine | November 9, 2015

In a biography to be published this week, former President George H. W. Bush says that he has “mellowed” on gay marriage.

The father of former President George W. Bush and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is the subject of a biography by Jon Meacham to be published by Random House titled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.

According to The New York Times, Bush’s evolution on marriage equality is described in the book.

Read more

US Spy Chief’s ‘Highly Unusual’ Reported Contact With Military Official Raises Concerns

James Clapper testifies about ‘worldwide cyber threats’ during a hearing on Thursday in Washington. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

 

Spencer Ackerman | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | September 11, 2015

 

James Clapper said to have frequent communication with military official who is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated intelligence

 

arack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Brigadier General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.

Grove is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence.

In communications, Clapper, who is far more senior than Grove, is said to tell Grove how the war looks from his vantage point, and question Grove about Central Command’s assessments. Such a situation could place inherent pressure on a subordinate, sources said.

Read more

Hillary Clinton. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

 

Glenn Greenwald | The Intercept | Reader Supported News | September 11, 2105

eading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars — Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation were going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).

Since then, O’Hanlon in particular has advocated for increased military force in more countries than one can count. That’s not surprising: Brookings is funded in part by one of the Democratic Party’s favorite billionaires, Haim Saban, who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel and once said of himself: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.” Pollack advocated for the attack on Iraq while he was “Director of Research of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.” Saban became the Democratic Party’s largest fundraiser — even paying $7 million for the new DNC building — and is now a very substantial funder of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. In exchange, she’s written a personal letter to him publicly “expressing her strong and unequivocal support for Israel in the face of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement.”

Read more

 

Jeb Bush Just Botched the Iraq Question. Again.

Jeb Bush. (photo: Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images)

 

Charles Pierce | Esquire | Reader Supported News | August 16, 2015

Jeb (!) spoke about the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. invasion of Iraq again. He becomes less and less coherent every time.

 

oday’s Headline:  FLORIDA MAN FEEDS HISTORY TO HIS PET PYTHON.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) said on Thursday during a campaign stop in Iowa that “taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal,” according to multiple reports…The Beast reported that Bush went on to say he didn’t want to hypothesize about what would have happened if his brother, former President George W. Bush, had not ordered the invasion of Iraq, which led to the toppling of Hussein.” Then that’s back to the future and you could make a movie,” Jeb Bush said, according to the Beast.

He really doesn’t have a good answer to this question, does he? First, he stood by C-Plus Augustus. Then he got bum-rushed into saying he didn’t. Then, in Cleveland, he blamed the president for squandering the laurel-wreathed triumph that was The Surge. And now we have this bibble-babble that starts out completely wrong and then starts shedding coherence by the dipthong. Were he as deft a politician as, say, Donald Trump, Jeb (!) would have dumped big brother over the side on this issue the moment he announced his campaign. (“Sorry, but my brother was a stupid loser, a yoooooooge stupid loser. I got your real surge right here.”) The best he can do–and why he hasn’t done this yet, I have no idea–is to repeat ISIS over and over again until his listeners are stunned into silence. Republican presidential candidates are supposed to be able to blot out the blunders of their glorious ancestors with more agility than this. (“The Iran nuclear deal is a sellout. What’s that? Missiles? Mullahs? Reagan? Eh? Sorry, I was distracted by an elephant beetle.”) Jeb (!)’s biggest problem is that he can’t seem to find the memory hole without which no Republican presidential candidate can thrive.

Read more

Neocons to Americans: Trust Us Again

President George W. Bush pauses for applause during his State of the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003. (photo: White House/Consortium News)

 

Robert Parry | Consortium News | Reader Supported News | August 16, 2015

Marching in lockstep with Israeli hardliners, American neocons are aiming their heavy media artillery at the Iran nuclear deal as a necessary first step toward another “regime change” war in the Mideast – and they are furious when anyone mentions the Iraq War disaster and the deceptions that surrounded it, writes Robert Parry.

 

merica’s neocons insist that their only mistake was falling for some false intelligence about Iraq’s WMD and that they shouldn’t be stripped of their powerful positions of influence for just one little boo-boo. That’s the point of view taken by Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt as he whines about the unfairness of applying “a single-interest litmus test,” i.e., the Iraq War debacle, to judge him and his fellow war boosters.

After noting that many other important people were on the same pro-war bandwagon with him, Hiatt criticizes President Barack Obama for citing the Iraq War as an argument not to listen to many of the same neocons who now are trying to sabotage the Iran nuclear agreement. Hiatt thinks it’s the height of unfairness for Obama or anyone else to suggest that people who want to kill the Iran deal — and thus keep alive the option to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran — “are lusting for another war.”

Hiatt also faults Obama for not issuing a serious war threat to Iran, a missing ultimatum that explains why the nuclear agreement falls “so far short.” Hiatt adds: “war is not always avoidable, and the judicious use of force early in a crisis, or even the threat of force, can sometimes forestall worse bloodshed later.”

Read more

Iraq: “A War Crime, Pure and Simple”

People inspect the scene of an earlier explosion in Baghdad, December 22, 2011. (Michael Kamber/The New York Times)

 

Dahr Jamail | Truthout | August 10, 2015

A dozen years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, that country, now effectively another Middle East failed state, remains a bloody, chaotic symbol of the failed US imperial project.

Margaret Griffis, a journalist who has been covering casualty numbers in Iraq since 2006 for Antiwar.com, has published these recent headlines that give one an idea of how life is in today’s Iraq:

“Mass Executions Terrorize Mosul; 141 Killed in Iraq”

“132 Killed across Iraq as Airstrikes Continue”

“At Least 4,693 Killed across Iraq in July”

Read more