Author: mara.ahmed

AN OPEN LETTER OF RECONCILIATION & RESPONSIBILITY TO THE IRAQI PEOPLE
A newly released Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” video has made international headlines showing a July 2007 shooting incident outside of Baghdad in which U.S. forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees. Two soldiers from Bravo Company 2-16, the company depicted in the video, have written an open letter of apology to the Iraqis who were injured or lost loved ones during the attack that, these former soldiers say, is a regular occurrence in this war. Read and sign letter.

“I have been actively involved for the past two decades in movements for justice involving sexism, racism, economic inequality, and the barbarism of war. There isn’t a day that I don’t feel a sense of profound grief about the pain that these systems cause. The luck of the draw left me in a position of relative privilege, which means I escape virtually all of the suffering imposed by those systems. What satisfaction I find in this world comes from trying to be part of movements that struggle for something better. In those efforts, things inevitably get stirred up. I take no particular pleasure in that and wish it could be otherwise. But none of us get to choose the world into which we are born. All we get to choose is how we respond to it.” (Robert Jensen) Full article.

brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!

“What is the calculus of grief that makes some lives more valuable and grievable and others just “collateral damage” and not even worthy of counting? Why are some issues of sartorial choice or even the lack thereof more worthy of spilling tears, ink, or blood than issues of life, justice, and the freedom from wars, occupation, and torture? Why is it so easily, so liberally assumed that struggles of gender and sexual justice are completely distinct and separable from struggles against racism, Islamophobia, class exploitation, and imminent or current wars? The insistence on the separation of these entwined and intersecting struggles is not innocent but entirely complicit in manipulating the former struggles against the equally vital latter ones. Don’t we all remember the proliferation of Afghani burqas on the hallowed pages of the New York Times in the days leading up to the war to “rescue” the Muslim women? “What about the abominable flogging video purportedly from Swat that went viral in the days leading up to the US-directed Pakistani military action there, and which was later exposed to be a fake?” (Huma Dar) Full article.

In our peculiar post-9/11 world, it is apparently less controversial to kill a suspect in cold blood than to hold him in preventive detention. The Post reported on February 14 that the Obama administration has killed many more suspected terrorists than it has captured. According to National Journal, Obama ordered more drone attacks in his first year than President Bush did in two full presidential terms. The Post article suggested that the two developments may not be unrelated. A dead suspect, after all, has no right to habeas corpus; and with a dead suspect, one need not agonize over the choice between civilian criminal court and a military commission. Full article.

Written in 1954 by one of the coup’s chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran’s elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist. Full article.

While visiting her at Walter Reed, I witnessed many soldiers returning from Iraq with cancer, unknown to the public and unacknowledged by the military. Walter Reed had two floors dedicated solely to the soldiers arriving daily with cancer. Their lives were spared on the battlefield, but the cancer was ravaging their bodies from within. I began to do research, and was alarmed to discover how the military uses depleted uranium, especially in Iraq. Soldiers I talked to at Walter Reed began to say the same thing: Cancer is not a “war wound,” so the military denies responsibility. Since soldiers are uninformed about depleted uranium, they don’t wear protective gear and unknowingly inhale the toxic, pollen-like, yellow dust. The toxins develop into different forms of rare cancers within four to 36 months. Full article.

The 27-year-old Dayton man had entered the center’s emergency room about 1 a.m. Friday and requested some sort of treatment. But Huff did not get that treatment, police said, and about 5:45 a.m. he reappeared at the center’s entrance, put a military-style rifle to his head and twice pulled the trigger. Huff fell near the foot of a Civil War statue, his blood covering portions of the front steps. Full article.