A congresswoman said Thursday that her “jaw dropped” when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military.
A government report indicates that the numbers could be even higher.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke before a House panel investigating the way the military handles reports of sexual assault.
She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her horror stories of being raped in the military.
“My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military,” said Harman, who has long sought better protection of women in the military.
“Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of their lives have taken since.
Gordon Brown is ready to override the misgivings of George Bush by going ahead with a major announcement on British troop withdrawals from Iraq. The US President will sit down to talks with Mr Brown today after their dinner at Downing Street last night sparked anti-Bush protests in Parliament Square.
Before he arrived at No 10, Mr Bush issued a veiled warning to Mr Brown that now was not the right time to be withdrawing forces from Iraq, saying such a decision depended on success of the allied mission. “I am confident that he, like me, will listen to our commanders to make sure that the sacrifices that have gone forward won’t be unravelled by drawdowns that may not be warranted at this point in time,” Mr Bush added.
But David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, signalled that Mr Brown would go ahead with plans to pull out British forces when the training of Iraqi forces was completed. Brushing aside tensions with the President, Mr Brown plans to make the announcement on the remaining 4,100 troops in Basra before the end of next month, when MPs begin their summer recess.
A growing number of Canadian soldiers are suffering after witnessing Afghan boys being raped by Afghan soldiers, the Toronto Star reported Monday.
Several military chaplains told the newspaper they had counseled veterans returning from combat in Afghanistan for severe post traumatic stress disorder and their reports weren’t being dealt with by the Canadian military.
On Saturday, the Star reported a Canadian corporal gave closed-door parliamentary testimony about a boy’s rape he witnessed in 2006 and the visible signs of rape trauma.
U.S. media organizations like CNN, NBC, FOX and others recently reported that the death total of U.S. combatants in Iraq War had just reached 4,000. The problem is that this data seems to be an intentional distortion. Indeed, official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs data indicates that the death total from the attrition of Iraq Wars had already reached 73,846, as of May 2007. In comparison Sky News reports that during the Vietnam War, 58,000 soldiers were killed between 1964 and 1973, an average of 26 a day. LINK
It is indeed, a well known fact that in a so-called free society, the U.S. President George W. Bush administration has banned media organizations from photographing most of the coffins, along with the maimed military personnel returning into the U.S. from Iraq. And, if you think that the U.S. President Bush administration has followed “freedom of the press” in Iraq, you have made a sudden mistake.
Journalists in Iraq, who have not prostituted themselves into disseminating the Bush administration’s public relations on the “overall success” of the Iraq War, are being subjected to oppressive persecution.
Journalists have complained of fascist-style harassment.
Is this the action of a U.S. President, who is fighting for democracy, that fundamentally relies on transparency toward supporting a critically informed public?
Indeed, award-winning independent Journalist Dahr Jamail reports that “when the United States handed over power to a ’sovereign’ Iraqi interim government, [Paul] Bremer [former U.S. administrator in Iraq] simply passed on the authority to Ayad Allawi.” LINK
Mr. Dahmail further documents that, Mr. Allawi is the “U.S.-installed interim Prime Minister, who has had longstanding ties with the British intelligence service MI6 and the CIA.” LINK
Investigative Journalist Dahr Jamail, also reports that Allawi’s “media commission had sent out an official ’order’ for news organisations to “stick to the government line on the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah, or face legal action.” The warning was sent on the letterhead of Mr. Allawi.
The result is that Iraq has become under the Bush administration, a far worse “modern Stalinist” police state, than Iraq had ever been under Saddam Hussein. Over 1 million people in Iraq have been reportedly killed, as the direct result of the Bush regime’s pre-emptive War in Iraq. This is in addition to the over 73,000 U.S. military personnel already killed, as documented by U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
Mr. Bush has coordinated an effort to limit the American public’s understanding of the current Iraq War, based upon the myth-making presentation of the War. That myth-making” has sought to convince Americans, in part, that the war is taking a far less toll of American lives.
Indeed, it is apparent that the U.S. Bush administration, is anxious to “declare progress” and “victory” in Iraq, so that it can pursue its further military expansionist agenda against Iran. Seymour M. Hersh has sounded alarm bells about the Bush regime’s nuclear war ambitions against Iran. LINK
But, “The Bush administration has rejected comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, which traumatized Americans a generation ago, with a sad procession of military body bags and television footage of grim wartime cruelty,” observed China Daily.LINK
The intellectual inspiration for the U.S. Bush administration’s public relations management of the Iraq War, is Leo Strauss.Wikipedia notes that “Strauss asks his readers to consider whether it is true that noble lies have no role at all to play, in uniting and guiding the polis.” LINK
In 2003, the magazine Foreign Policy In Focus, noted that thanks to the “Week in Review” section of the 4 May 2003 edition of the New York Times and another investigative article in a recent New Yorker magazine, “The cognoscenti have suddenly been made aware that key neoconservative strategists behind the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign and military policy, consider themselves to be followers of Strauss. LINK
Two other very influential Straussians, noted by Foreign Policy in Focus in May 2003, “include Weekly Standard Chief Editor William Kristol and Gary Schmitt, founder, chairman, and director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). This is a six-year-old neoconservative group whose alumni include Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon [then] chief Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a number of other senior foreign policy officials.” LINK
“PNAC’s early prescriptions and subsequent open letters to President George W. Bush on how to fight the war on terrorism, have anticipated to an uncanny extent precisely what the administration has done.” LINK
The Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), notes that a leading “Straussian” advisor to the Bush Administration has been “Paul Wolfowitz, who was trained by Strauss’ alter-ego and fellow University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom. EIR specifically noted that Wolfowitz has helped champion the “war party” within the civilian bureaucracy at the Pentagon. LINK
Strauss emphasized that ’myths’ are “vitally needed” to “give people meaning and purpose and to ensure a stable society”; and even though he was Jewish, he praised Nazi Germany for embracing the power of myth to control the development of “liberal tendencies” in society. In the view of Strauss, presenting the truth harms society, by liberating “the governed” as “free thinkers” from the “necessary” social control of “elites”.
The Bush administration is inspired by the neo-fascist ideology of Leo Strauss, and has sought to dupe the American public into ignorance about the human suffering of U.S. military personnel in Iraq, by using Straussian techniques of political manipulation.
Shadia Drury, in Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999), argues that Strauss taught different things to different students and inculcated an elitist strain in American political leaders, that is linked to imperialist militarism and to Christian fundamentalism.
Drury accuses Strauss of teaching that “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical, because they need to be led and because they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.”
Nicholas Xenos in “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror,” Logosjournal.com similarly argues that Strauss “was not an anti-liberal in the sense in which we commonly mean ’anti-liberal’ today, but an anti-democrat in a fundamental sense; a true reactionary. Strauss, was somebody who wanted to go back to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts; of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, and of pure fascism.”
The U.S. President Bush administration’s stated goal of staying in Iraq, to guide Iraq into democracy, and also to combat “terrorists” who threaten American and international security interests, is an apparent clever Straussian ruse. The Bush administration seeks an apparent agenda in Iraq which is far from being the affirmation of democracy and peace.
The lives of Americans have been lost not in the defence of democracy and toward global peace, but as apparent “ritual sacrifices” to the messianic Eugenic ideology of America’s ruling elites. The War on Terrorism appears to being used as a pseudonym for a Eugenics War, that seeks to use the pre-text of terrorists, to execute genocide against Iraqis, through the exploitation of and the “sacrifice” of more than 73,000 U.S. military personnel.
Get the full U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs report: PDF LINK
Massive federal deficits, not enough money for social programs. Where have all our tax dollars gone? The charts below (click for full page versions) show how our income tax dollars were spent in FY2007, which ended last September 30 (data from Budget of the United States Government: Historical Tables Fiscal Year 2009, Table 8.7). As you can see, 52.7% of these discretionary funds went to the military.
These charts exclude expenditures for Social Security, Medicare, and federal highways since these programs are paid from dedicated taxes maintained in separate trust funds. They also exclude interest paid on the national debt since that spending is “mandatory”, not “discretionary”. These charts show the part of the federal budget that Congress and the President directly allocate each year (with the funds derived from our income taxes, corporation taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, and other miscellaneous taxes).