Iraq/Afghanistan
revere | September 6, 2009If the UK invaded and occupied Massachusetts because the IRA raised money and housed some of its members in South Boston I think most people would say that was not just a mistake but wrong. Assuming for the moment that the GOP was in charge and had no interest in defending the state, I can predict with some confidence that Massachusetts's citizens would fight back (as they did once before) and make it very costly for the British to stay. Logistically how could the British leave without losing face and suffering a crushing geopolitical defeat? The answer is simple: use boats (and now) planes.…
revere | December 24, 2008The Bagdad Hack is neither a journalist nor a clever trick to get something done in Iraq. It's a cough. And reading about it is dismaying and maddening. As someone who did a lot of work on unexplained illness following the Gulf War of 1991 -- illnesses steadfastly denied by the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs -- when these same folks djinned up the steaming pile of shit we call the War in Iraq they had plenty of time to plan for prevention. But when I inquired of colleagues (I was by then no longer involved) if there were any pre-deployment plans to establish baselines and…
revere | November 26, 2008In a recent interview with a Japanese broadcasting company, still-President George Bush summed up his judgment on the Iraq debacle: it's a great success. He's "very pleased," mainly that he toppled Saddam Hussein. What about the rest. Like the streets being rivers of sewage?
Spare tires come in handy in Sadr City when lakes of sewage overflow trenches or bubble up from broken underground pipes. Pedestrians pull them from at-ready stacks to create a foot bridge across the excrement.
It's a routine honed by years of neglect, indifference and, recently, good intentions sucked into a cycle of…
revere | November 11, 2008
The Reveres, November 11, 2008, year five of the War in Iraq and year seven of the War in Afghanistan
revere | October 29, 2008There is a lot of misery in this world, too much of it the result of what we humans do to each other. And it's getting worse. A typical example, is a country where 28% of the children are malnourished, up from 19% five years ago; where in 2006 11% of the newborns were underweight, up from 4% three years before; where 15% of the population doesn't have and can't afford enough food and is dependent food assistance programs for survival; where 70% don't have adequate water and 80% don't have adequate sanitation so that in the poorest urban neighborhoods people drink a water and sewage mixture;…
revere | July 22, 2008This is the first, and I hope the last, time I come anywhere near defending Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, but I want to make a more general point so I'll swallow hard and do it. This is about his supposed gaffe wherein he seems to think Iraq and Pakistan share a border:
D[iane] S[awyer]: Do you agree the situation in Afghanistan is precarious and urgent?
J[ohn] M[cCain]: Well, I think it's very serious. I mean, it's a serious situation.
DS: Not precarious and urgent?
JM: Oh I- I don't- know wha- exactly whether- we can run through the vocabulary, but it's a very-
it's a ((v…
revere | July 15, 2008What's a little sodium dichromate, anyway? So it's a known human carcinogen and can do a lot of other nasty things. No big deal. Not for Iraq war contractor, KBR, anyway. At the time KBR was a subsidiary of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton. So when they were given a lucrative contract to clean up and safeguard Iraqi oilfields after the Bush Mission was Accomplished in 2003, they told the soldiers and workers that the chemical, used as an antirust agent and then strewn all over the oil facilities, was a "mild irritant." Later they admitted…
revere | June 15, 2008Of the many tag lines I've seen as part of people's electronic signatures, the most apt for this post is this one:
"I used to care about stuff. Now I have a pill for that."
Sergeant Christopher LeJeune was anxious and depressed after long duty on Baghdad's dangerous streets. He often had to collect enemy dead from houses he had attacked. Sometimes there were tiny shoes and toys scattered around. The whole package was starting to get to him. So the Army took care of his problem:
While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop…
revere | April 15, 2008US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, is in Indonesia to discuss matters of mutual interest with the Indonesian government. Topic number one was the Indonesian government's opt out of the international influenza surveillance system which has been in place for almost 60 years and provides vital information on what flu strains to include in the next year's seasonal flu shots. But the system is not limited to seasonal influenza and is an important part of the global surveillance of all influenza viruses that might be of human health concern, chiefly among the non-seasonal…
revere | March 25, 2008Of course the 4000th US combat death in Iraq is an artificial milestone. It's not different than the 10th or the 3999th or what will for certain be the 4010th, a human being in the prime of life who is alive now but won't be by the end of next week. But the number 4000 is a symbol that stands for the shredded lives, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, from a war started on purpose by a handful of American government officials.
We choose not to celebrate the lives of the 4000 soldier victims, or the lives of their enemies, or the lives of the uncounted innocent civilians…
revere | March 24, 2008The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for Good in the world. Now the BBC World Service has put some numbers on this in a survey of 26,000 people from 25 different countries:
As the United States government prepares to send a further 21,500 troops to Iraq, the survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has…
revere | March 10, 2008I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you occupy a country you also assume responsibility for its public health. That's both international law and it's the right thing to do. In Iraq we haven't done that. So while I am about to say it once more, after I've said it I have something else to say, too, something that underscores my point in triplicate.
But first the main point:.
It is the kind of news that everybody had been dreading. An outbreak of cholera in Iraq, which started in two Northern provinces, has already reached Baghdad and has become Iraq's biggest cholera outbreak in…
revere | February 14, 2008Via one of my favorite blogs, Brain Police, this primer on US - Iranian relations:
So in 1953 we screwed the Iranian people out of a democracy so a British company could keep stealing their oil. Now it's bad for us and really bad for the Iranians. Especially Iranian workers:
As you probably know, the Iranian government has been arresting workers who have stood up and tried to organize unions -- including Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi, who both languish in jails despite continuing health problems.
This repression is in violation of International Labour Organization core conventions and…
revere | February 8, 2008The President's budget was announced on Monday (see our post here), and as many people know (including us), it is Dead on Arrival. But it is still a significant for its symbolism. This is what the Bush administration wants. They know they won't get it but they are making a statement. Some statement:
revere | February 4, 2008Most Americans think the Afghanistan mistake was the Right Thing to Do. While we are on record (here and here) as of another opinion, the conventional view is that getting rid of the Taliban was Good (they were Bad, which is true) and anyway it was payback for 9/11 (even though the Afghans didn't actually commit 9/11, only were the geographic location of the planner -- thanks to US aid when bin Laden was fighting the Soviets. Now Pakistan is where the 9/11 leaders live (not to mention that the actual perpetrators, who mostly came from Saudi). You fill in the rest. Still, few agree with us.…
revere | December 12, 2007The dramatic infectious agents like MRSA, Ebola and bird flu get the headlines but there are a lot of others out there, some of them capable of being just as nasty. Consider the new variant of adenovirus serotype 14, for example:
Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon in April when he realized that an unusual number of patients, including young, vigorous adults, were being hit by a frightening pneumonia.
"What was so striking was to see patients who were otherwise healthy be just devastated," Gilbert said. Within a day…
revere | December 2, 2007It's been a while since we pressed this particular button but it seems it's time:
Baghdad is facing a 'catastrophe' with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.
The disease - spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death - threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the…
revere | November 26, 2007What's the big deal about putting a few bad guys into "stressful" positions (assuming you know for sure they really are bad guys)? You call that torture? Waterboarding maybe is torture (we aren't sure about that yet; requires some study***), but stressful positions and a love tap or two? Give me a break:
Source: Waiting for the Guards, Amnesty International
So what's the big deal? This was straight out of the CIA interrogation manual. No pretense we don't do it.
This video is also not play acting:
In order to make the film, the directors put the actor into a stress position for six hours…
revere | November 23, 2007Rabia Balkhi Hospital (RBH) is an obstetrical hospital in Afghanistan that is one of the jewels in the crown of the US aid effort after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2002. Here's the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website boast:
HHS activities have had an enormous impact on the quality of care at RBH, have saved the lives of hundreds of women and newborns, and have improved significantly the skills and knowledge of the doctors, nurses and midwives at the hospital. We are continually adding new improvements that dramatically expand the hospital's life-saving capacity, such as…
revere | November 12, 2007Here's a thought for "Veterans" Day: one out of nine people in the US is a veteran but one out of four homeless persons is a veteran. That's something for Americans to be proud of for sure. Support Our Troops is either just a slogan or they stop being worthy of support when they stop being cannon fodder:
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans…