February 19, 2005
Life altering experiences.
Someone on
Metafilter asked people to post their most
life-altering experiences, and it turned into an amazing read. Pretty long though. There also are ones for
happiest moments and
major epiphanies. Sometimes the web amazes me. I had to create a new category of "people" for this one. Via
Running Scared.
February 18, 2005
Behind the walls at ward 54.
A report by Mark Benjamin on
Ward 54, the main psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Army Hospital, reveals a lot of dissatisfaction with the troubled vets treated there. It appears that the Army is more interested in avoiding disability claims for post-traumatic stress syndrome than they are with helping to heal the soldiers. There have been several suicides there.
In fact, repeated interviews over the course of one year with 14 soldiers who have been treated in Walter Reed's inpatient and outpatient psychiatric wards, and a review of medical records and Army documents, suggest that the Army's top hospital is failing to properly care for many soldiers traumatized by the Iraq war. As the Soto-Ramirez case suggests, inadequate suicide watch is one concern. But the problems run deeper. Psychiatric techniques employed at Walter Reed appear outmoded and ineffective compared with state-of-the-art care as described by civilian doctors. For example, Walter Reed favors group therapy over one-on-one counseling; and the group therapy is mostly administered by a rotating cast of medical students and residents, not full-fledged doctors or veterans. The troops also complain that the Army relies too much on pills; few of the soldiers took all the medication given to them by the hospital.
Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers' mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez's medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. "Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD," wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed.
"The Army does not want to get into the mental-health game in a real way to really help people," said Col. Travis Beeson, who was flown to Walter Reed for psychiatric help during a second tour with one of the Army's special operations units in Iraq. "They want to Band-Aid it. They want you out of there as fast as possible, and they don't want to pay for it." Indeed, some psychiatric patients at Walter Reed are given the option of signing a form releasing them from the hospital as long as they give up any future disability payments from the Army. One soldier from Pennsylvania, who was shot five times in the chest and saved by body armor, told me he would do anything to get out of Walter Reed, even relinquish disability pay. "I'll sign anything as soon as I can get my hands on it," he told me several days before being released from the hospital. "I loved the Army. I was obsessed with it. The Army was my life. Fuck them now."
Giving soldiers enough drugs to keep them in a catatonic stupor isn't an effective treatment. But that's part of the policy of avoiding confronting the realities of the war. Despite the fact that they are there to cur war-related problems, soldiers are actually punished for bringing up the war in therapy sessions. Apparently the Army would prefer to blame their nightmares on their mothers.
When it is done right, PTSD treatment is a delicate task. Trust is crucial, and medications are carefully administered and monitored. Most critical is getting patients to control the powerful and destructive emotions that can follow a traumatic event like fighting a war. What bewildered the soldiers at Walter Reed, though, was that the Army seemed determined to downplay their war trauma and search for other causes for their mental health problems. In group therapy, sessions often focused more on family relationships and childhood experiences than war, the soldiers said. One outpatient soldier was so angered about this avoidance of the topic of war, he threw a chair during group therapy. Doctors promptly sent him to lockdown.
"When you get [to Walter Reed], they analyze you, break you down, and try to find anything wrong with you before you got in" the Army, said Spc. Josh Sanders, in a telephone conversation from his home in Lovington, Ill. "They started asking me questions about my mom and my dad getting divorced. That was the last thing on my mind when I'm thinking about people getting fragged and burned bodies being pulled out of vehicles," said Sanders. "They asked me if I missed my wife. Well, shit yeah, I missed my wife. That is not the fucking problem here. Did you ever put your foot through a 5-year-old's skull?"
Yea, that'll do it. Blame their problems on things that happened to them BEFORE they joined the army. And the thing is these soldiers will NEVER recover. At least not ever forget the horrors they witnessed, and even participated in. And unlike other generations of American vets, they won't be able to claim that they suffered for a noble purpose, or to defend their country, or to make the world "safe for democracy." But for no reason at all, except to make some rich, greedy people even richer.
Demands to stop illegal child labor at Wal-Mart.
Via
Truthout is this
demand by child labor and union activists that Wal-Mart stop engaging in illegal child labor. It's already been fined repeatedly for it, but with the connivance of the Labor Department itself is still getting away with it.
The Food and Commercial Workers Union and Child Labor Coalition present a proposal to immediately stop the use of children in hazardous jobs at the nation's largest employer.
Wal-Mart could stop illegal child labor in its stores through distinctive employee badges for underage workers that could readily identify them as being prohibited from hazardous assignments, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the Child Labor Coalition. Combined with unannounced Labor Department inspections, the use of children for hazardous jobs would come to a rapid halt.
The two organizations are sponsoring, at
http://www.ufcw.org/, an e-mail campaign directed at Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott and U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao asking them to abandon a sweetheart deal on child labor announced earlier this week, and to take meaningful action to end the abuse of young workers.
Key to the union/coalition proposal is the re-badging of underage workers. Both managers and young workers would always be aware that certain assignments are illegal. Compliance would require unannounced inspections to make sure that badges are properly issued, and that no manager is pressuring minors into illegal assignments.
Scott and Chao are being presented with a demand to amend a settlement agreement that required the Labor Department to give Wal-Mart an unprecedented 15 days notice before any inspection. Advanced notice clearly undermines compliance, and allows managers simply to re-assign underage workers before an inspection.
... Hundreds of children are maimed and crippled in accidents, some losing arms and legs, every year involving balers and compactors commonly used in Wal-Mart and other retail stores to handle the disposal of boxes and similar materials. The law has long prohibited minors from operating this kind of machinery. A Labor Department investigation brought allegations that Wal-Mart was using illegal child labor to operate the hazardous equipment in several states. To settle the case, Wal-Mart paid $135,000 and the Labor Department agreed to advance notice of inspections.
The sweetheart arrangement between the Labor Department and Wal-Mart is one of the sleaziest and most illegal deals allowed by the Bush administration, and that's saying something. It violates so many laws and principles they can't even be counted.
A proper suit.
Via the ever interesting
caterina.net is a delightful blog,
English Cut, by Thomas Mahon, a "bespoke savile row tailor, london." Everything you ever wanted to know about a proper suit. Quite fascinating.
He makes what they call "bespoke" suits, which are evidently the top of the line.
Here he explains what that is.
Bespoke is actually a term which dates from the 17th century, when tailors held the full lengths of cloth in their premises. When a customer chose a length of material it was said to have “been spoken for”, hence a tailor who makes your clothes individually to your specific personal requirements, is called bespoke. Unlike “made to measure” which simply uses a basic pattern which is then simply adjusted to your measurements.
I'll discuss with you what type of suit you are looking for and it's uses. Then a cloth is chosen from the full range available today, also which type of style and fit would be most suitable for you
Clothes made by me have all the hallmarks you would expect from true bespoke tailoring. More than 20 measurements and figuration details are taken from the customer. Then a personal pattern will be cut from scratch, no basic pattern is simply adjusted as so many other tailors do today.
Using your pattern the cloth is then cut and trimmed using the finest linings and silks available. A single tailor is then given the parts of the garment to make from the fitting stages to the final complete suit. Each suit is completely hand made even down to the button holes.
In case you're wondering, these start at around $4000. Since that's probably a bit too much for most of us, he also kindly tells
here all about the various types of suits, from ready-to-wear up to bespoke. Every man should read this. I've never seen it laid out so comprehensively.
All in all a most interesting and classy site. After reading about Iraq, especially about the savagery of the British over there (we wouldn't want the Americans to get all the credit), it's nice to be reminded that there are still civilized people out there. Somewhere. Or if not civilized, at least properly dressed. That may be all we can hope for at this point.
Leave Our Country Now.
Hassan Juma'a Awad is general secretary of Iraq's Southern Oil Company Union and president of the Basra Oil Workers' Union. In
Leave Our Country Now he tells how Iraqi oil workers have been fighting since the first days of the British-American invasion to unionize, and how they feel that the occupation is nothing but a blatant attempt to neo-colonize Iraq and steal its oil. He demands that the so-called coalition forces leave immediately, stating unequivocally that the Iraqis don't need any help, and that they are perfectly capable of managing their own affairs.
We lived through dark days under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. When the regime fell, people wanted a new life: a life without shackles and terror; a life where we could rebuild our country and enjoy its natural wealth. Instead, our communities have been attacked with chemicals and cluster bombs, and our people tortured, raped and killed in our homes.
Saddam's secret police used to creep over the roofs into our homes at night; occupation troops now break down our doors in broad daylight. The media do not show even a fraction of the devastation that has engulfed Iraq. Journalists who dare to report the truth of what is happening have been kidnapped by terrorists. This serves the agenda of the occupation, which aims to eliminate witnesses to its crimes.
... We see it as our duty to defend the country's resources. We reject and will oppose all moves to privatize our oil industry and national resources. We regard this privatization as a form of neo-colonialism, an attempt to impose a permanent economic occupation to follow the military occupation.
The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia. We never knew this sort of division before. Our families intermarried, we lived and worked together. And today we are resisting this brutal occupation together, from Falluja to Najaf to Sadr City. The resistance to the occupation forces is a God-given right of Iraqis, and we, as a union, see ourselves as a necessary part of this resistance - although we will fight using our industrial power, our collective strength as a union, and as a part of civil society which needs to grow in order to defeat both still-powerful Saddamist elites and the foreign occupation of our country.
Bush and Blair should remember that those who voted in last month's elections in Iraq are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them. Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer, due to "fears of civil war", are in fact speaking only for themselves and the minority of Iraqis whose interests are dependent on the occupation.
We as a union call for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces and their military bases. We don't want a timetable - this is a stalling tactic. We will solve our own problems. We are Iraqis, we know our country and we can take care of ourselves. We have the means, the skills and resources to rebuild and create our own democratic society.
Via
Common Dreams.
February 17, 2005
Syria and American "extraordinary rendition."
Bob Herbert's latest column in the NY Times,
Our Friends, the Torturers, points out the hypocrisy in Bush's criticizing Syria for sponsoring terrorism and torture, while simultaneously sending people there for torture. He cites the case of a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 and thru the repulsive practice of sent to Syria where he was tortured and kept for over a year without ever being charged.
The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.
The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.
I've written before about "extraordinary renditon," which is so barbaric and illegal it's almost inconceivable, and yet seems to have become a standard American practice. Herbert eloquently describes the horror of the practice.
The policy is known as extraordinary rendition, which is an extreme variation of a little-known but longstanding legal principle called rendition. Rendition most commonly refers to the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from a foreign country to the United States for the purpose of answering criminal charges.
Think, for example, of a drug kingpin who is abducted in Colombia and brought to the U.S. to stand trial for trafficking. The defendant is said to have been "rendered" to justice in the U.S.
The courts here have tended to overlook the circumstances surrounding the seizure of such suspects. But upon arrival in the U.S., the normal rules of due process in criminal proceedings kick in, and the suspect is entitled to a fair trial.
In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It's as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One's guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.
The feds think they have the right to do this to anyone at all. All they have to do is claim they suspect him (or her) of terrorism, and that's it. No proof is required. And they consider pot smokers, gays, liberals, and many others to be "terrorists." "
In extraordinary rendition there are no rules."
This is such a major development. It used to be that they felt that only American law applied, and that it applied everywhere, inside or outside of the US. Which was illegal and offensive enough. But now the position is that there simply are no laws. Period. This reminds me of the "Dictatus Papae", a papal "bull" put out in the fourteenth century, I believe. The first line read: "The pope can do no wrong."
(Actually this type of thing has been going on in America for quite a long time. Since the beginning I suspect. No one ever talks about it, but an awful lot of people have just "disappeared" over the years in the good ol' USA. It used to happen all of the time in the South. Black folks would just "disappear", and everyone was too afraid to talk about it. What we have today is just the same mentality, crazed southern sheriffs given jet planes, fancy equipment, shifty lawyers and plenty of funds to play with. Not just in the south either, though usually not as blatantly.)
February 16, 2005
Overviews of the Iraqi mess.
Several articles lately giving good overviews of the current mess in Iraq. Tom Englehardt of
TomDispatch has
Flattened Iraq, which is very bleak. Rory McCarthy, the Guardian's Bagdhad correspondent for nearly two years
reviews his time there. He's also very pessimistic. And freelance journalist David Enders, writes
Baghdad Journal for
Mother Jones magazine, the latest entry being
Denial or Despair.
All of these are very lengthy, and actually too depressing to quote much. Here's a snippet from Engelhardt, essentially stating that everyrhing is a disastrous mess, and that the corporate imperialists who have taken over the US government clearly have no intention of acknowledging this or of changing their plans. "No retreat, no surrender" is still their motto, as "good cop" John Kerry emhasized so forcefully at one of their conventions last summer.
In any case, soon a new government is to take… well, the normal word here would be "power," but that's not a word to be used idly in this situation. There are at present, as far as can be told, just about none of the normal institutions of civil government left to take over in Baghdad. All Iraqi ministries have American advisers in them. The Iraqi armed forces that the new government might command seem to consist of only about 5,000 functional troops, no heavy arms, and no air force. The strength of the Kurdish vote and the lack of a Sunni one look sure to create a weak coalition of some sort in Baghdad where all the legislators will be targeted by assassins. The Bush administration is deeply embedded in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone where a $1-2 billion new embassy is to be built; its 120,000 or more troops are bunkered into up to 14 massive, "permanent" military bases, also known as "enduring camps"; its CIA contingent is probably the largest in the world; its officials are openly talking about American troops remaining in Iraq at or near present levels at least through 2007; the administration is eager to negotiate a long-term Status of Forces Agreement with the new Iraqi government; and, as Stephen R. Shalom recently discussed at the ZNET website, El-Salvador-style hit squads seem already to be operative.
... In reality, Iraq has been flattened by the Bush administration's tank and there's no obvious road to push it onto that's likely to lead anywhere palatable, no matter who may now be in the driver's seat. As Dilip Hiro indicates in an update of his pre-election report on Iraq's electoral cul-de-sac, even the most immediate problems of any new government will be fraught with peril. And whatever happens, for the foreseeable future, Iraq -- with its still largely unobtainable sea of oil -- will remain an occupied and thoroughly humiliated land. What image should then be chosen for America's Iraq -- Ponzi scheme, house of cards, or [fill in the blank] -- but not, I think, by any stretch of the imagination, a land of democracy and freedom.
I think virtually all so-called "western" journalists, whether of the left, right or attempting to be objective, are going to come up with rather pessimistic scenarios, no matter what happens. The expectation that non-white peoples can't do well is pervasive throughout Euro-America. I'm not sure I've ever read an article regarding a non-white nation that doesn't basically paint a bleak picture. Can't recall any offhand, anyway. So they will expect bad things to happen, and create policies based on that assumption; thus setting into motion a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies.
February 13, 2005
Chavez says US is terrorist state.
Al-Jazeera
reports that tensions between Veneuela and the US are continuing to deteriorate as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared the US a "terrorist" state, and promised to continue to oppose it. Venezuela has been recently strengthening its ties with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and other states opposed to America hegemony. Most ominously, they are helping arm each other.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has branded the United States a terrorist state while rejecting Washington's criticism of Caracas for its arms purchase from Russia.
Chavez, a fierce critic of US President George Bush and the US-led war in Iraq, on Saturday brushed aside US opposition to the agreement to buy 100,000 automatic rifles and about 40 military helicopters from Moscow.
"One has to ask whether there was transparency in the invasion of Iraq. The world knows President Bush lied openly about Iraq having chemical weapons," Chavez said.
"They keep on bombing cities, killing children, they have become a terrorist state," he said.
... Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, is a key crude supplier to the US. But relations soured after Chavez came to power in 1999, vowing to fight poverty with a self-proclaimed revolution.
US officials have accused Chavez of allowing Marxist rebels from neighbouring Colombia to shelter in Venezuela and criticise his increasingly close relations with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Chavez, however, rejects the charges and has moved to strengthen Venezuela's political and economic ties beyond Washington with states such as China, Russia and Iran.
The decision by Russia to sell at least a 100,000 AK-47s to Venezuela is a major development. Among other things, it represents the de-facto collapse of the Monroe Doctrine, one of the cornerstones of US foreign policy for nearly 200 years now. It's stunning that this story is not being reported by the American media.
The people of Venezuela and Cuba pretty much think that they are at war with the US, and have ever since Bush was re-elected. They're preparing for it, and very rapidly. But I guess everybody is in denial about this. Even Al-Jazeera. Note that at the end they state that Venezuela is strenghtening its "polilitcal and economic" ties; but the story itself is really about their "military" ties.
End of entries. ( ) ( )
