Anti-war
revere | December 2, 2009From a reader in Western Massachusetts:
10 Reasons to Oppose the Escalation of War in Afghanistan
Human cost of war: Soldier and civilian deaths and injuries have been escalating each year since 2001. Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have been killed while 32,000 Afghan civilians have died as a result of the war.
Economic cost of war: Each soldier in Afghanistan costs U.S. taxpayers $1 million per year. Private military contractors, known to de-fraud the Pentagon, exceed the number of soldiers in the war. No matter the war’s outcome, the defense industry wins with windfall profits.
U.S. economy…
revere | December 1, 2009What else is there to say? Lyndon Johnson may have done a powerful amount of good for civil rights but his legacy went down the Vietnam toilet. He was a big fool who listened to the wrong people, people who told him to push on. Barack Obama seems to be another Big Fool:
Pete Seeger, singing on CBS television, 1968. Afghanistan, 41 years later. Stuck in Afghani quicksand:
But every time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on,
We're waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy,
The…
revere | November 11, 2009This is an exact repeat of a post one year ago today. Except for this preamble about how disgusted we are that we have to repeat it:
The Reveres, November 11, 2009, year six of the War in Iraq and year eight of the War in 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 | August 9, 2009Sadako Sasaki was 2 years old on August 6, 1945 when an atomic bomb destroyed her city, Hiroshima. Three days later, 64 years ago today, a second atomic bomb destroyed Nagasaki. The radiation exposure from the Hiroshima bomb initiated a malignant transformation of Sadako's blood cells and ten years later she developed leukemia:
During her long hospital stays, Sadako began to fold paper cranes. According to Japanese legend, if an individual folds 1000 paper cranes, a wish will be granted. With each crane she folded, the wish was the same-to get well. October of 1955, Sasako folded her last…
revere | May 25, 2009We are now in the seventh Memorial Day of the Iraq War and the eighth of the Afghanistan War. This Priscilla Herdman version of Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda" appeared here last Memorial Day. Then, we were deeply dismayed by our government's actions. We remain so today. So here it is again, and for the same reasons:
On behalf of all the Reveres, Memorial Day 2009
revere | January 4, 2009This is about the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Because it cannot be ignored. Let me be clear at the outset: I think the assault on Gaza is brutal, vicious and cruel, the act of a notorious regional bully. Israeli leaders (Olmert, Barak, Livni and probably others) are war criminals in a class with Bushes Jr. and Sr., Kissinger, Nixon, Pinochet, Putin, Saddam, MiloÅ¡eviÄ, Karadzic, Charles Taylor and a number of others. I wanted to get that out of the way because I don't want this to be misunderstood as a defense of Israeli actions. Far from it. It is a condemnation of the kind of action that has…
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 | December 13, 2008Whether they are called the White House Press Secretary or the regime's Information Minister, they seem to have in common one characteristic: they are professional liars. It goes without saying that all of Bush's press secretaries have been blatant liars, but it's also true of Clinton's and virtually very one of their predecessors. Some of them have been much more likable than others and when they lied made my hackles rise less, but they were still professional liars and why anyone believes what they say is one of the big mysteries. I have to keep reminding myself that our "Information…
revere | December 6, 200844 more days until these murdering bastards are out of OUR government. Meanwhile how much damage will they do? Damage, as in broken bodies, maimed children, dead people:
An Afghan teenager who lost both legs in a cluster bomb explosion helped persuade his country to change its stance and join nearly 100 nations in signing a treaty Wednesday banning the disputed weapons.
Afghanistan was initially reluctant to join the pact - which the United States and Russia have refused to support - but agreed to after lobbying by victims maimed by cluster munitions, including 17-year-old Soraj Ghulan Habib…
revere | November 19, 2008A congressionally mandated independent panel of scientists has just issued a report verifying what many of us have know since the early 1990s. Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is real:
Gulf War syndrome is real and afflicts about 25 percent of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict, a U.S. report said Monday.
Two chemical exposures consistently associated with the disorder -- one to a drug given to soldiers to protect against nerve gas and the other said to protect against desert pests -- were cited as causes in the congressionally mandated report presented to Veterans Affairs…
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 | August 4, 2008The unfolding anthrax story may not unfold much because the government seems to be in a hurry to keep it folded. They claim -- not officially but through the news media -- to have found the nutjob who did it. He had opportunity, means and motive (he was a nutjob). Now he's dead and can't defend himself. Case closed. Maybe. But neither the news media nor the government who feeds them crapola have track records for credibility, so I'm not yet willing to lay this vicious homicide automatically on his grave. Yes, we are getting all sorts of leaked info but then we got a lot of leaked info when…
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 | July 13, 2008Cluster bombs are designed to do just one thing: kill people. It doesn't matter if the people are soldiers or not. In fact cluster bombs kill more civilians than they kill combatants. These diabolical weapons (I can't think of a better word) are not just one bomb but hundreds of little bomblets, each a small grenade, that scatter over a wide area and then explode. Or not. And that's the problem. Unexploded ordinance that later explode when disturbed by a farmer's plow, a child playing in the field or a family's valuable livestock. The civilized world wants to ban cluster bombs. The United…
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 | May 26, 2008The fifth Memorial Day of the Iraq War. I have no words. I'll give you this instead:
Priscilla Herdman is singing this 1971 song by Eric Bogle.
I feel like weeping.
For the Reveres. Memorial Day, 2008.
revere | May 25, 2008Until the middle of the last century the main victims of war were combatants. Since World War II the main victims of war are innocent civilians. Not just "collateral damage" (the euphemism to hide war crimes). Now there are "weapon systems" designed to be indiscriminate in their effect. The most notorious are cluster bombs, explosive canisters that spew their own small bomblets. Like landmines, they hurt mainly civilians. Like landmines, civilized nations are trying to ban them in modern warfare, just as poison gases have been banned. But the US is not participating. In fact it is actively…
revere | May 25, 2008Whether in the name of all that's decent or in the Name of God, Bring 'em Home: