[url=http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/31/1352240]Parents of a U.S. Marine Who Committed Suicide After Returning Home from Iraq File Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against Veterans Affairs
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When Americans opposed to war call for a cut off of funding, the administration responds that they don't support the troops. But a growing number of veterans groups and military families are saying it's the administration that's deserted the troops.

Study: Iraq, Afghan Deployments Linked to Rising Child Abuse, Neglect

A new Army-backed study shows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having an adverse effect on the wives and children of male servicemembers. Researchers at the Army’s Family Advocacy Program have found that army wives committed notably higher rates of child abuse and neglect while their husbands are deployed. Child neglect rose four-fold during periods military husbands were at war. Child abuse was nearly double. The study authors are calling for increased support services for military spouses left at home.

From Channel Zero: TVNL.

Merge 'em. I won't be offended.

Humanity loses it out, as well.

I don't have the skill to merge threads. Thank you for not taking offense that I linked the two threads.

US Friendly Fire" Kills British Soldiers in Afghanistan

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/082607E.shtml

Two Soldiers Killed by Friendly Fire Were Teenagers on Their First Tour of Duty
By Ned Temko
The Observer UK

Sunday 26 August 2007

Two of the British soldiers killed by an apparent 'friendly fire' air attack in Afghanistan on Thursday were 19-year-olds on their first tour of combat duty, it emerged yesterday.

Privates Aaron James McClure, Robert Graham Foster and 21-year-old John Thrumble - all from the 1st Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment - died after US air support was called in during a fierce firefight with the Taliban, a Ministry of Defence statement said. It was accompanied by moving tributes from the men's friends, comrades and family and by an expression of 'profound sadness' from Defence Secretary Des Browne.

The deaths triggered a sharp political row as the Conservatives attacked Gordon Brown for having demanded cuts in defence spending when he was Chancellor. In a strongly worded attack, shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said: 'As Chancellor, Gordon Brown never gave defence much priority and now the skies are black with chickens coming home to roost.

Soldiers and Doctors Struggle With Brain Injury

More and more troops are coming home from Iraq with brain damage, the result of repeated exposure to explosions, and doctors are having a difficult time keeping up. For many, the damage causes problems experts have never seen before and aren’t sure how to treat.

AP:

Thousands of troops have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, or TBI. These blast-caused head injuries are so different from the ones doctors are used to seeing from falls and car crashes that treating them is as much faith as it is science.

“I’ve been in the field for 20-plus years dealing with TBI. I have a very experienced staff. And they’re saying to me, ‘We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before,’ ” said Sandy Schneider, director of Vanderbilt University’s brain injury rehabilitation program.

Read more at the link.


One study found that troops are exposed to an average of one explosion a month. Each shock wave a soldier experiences increases the chances that the next will cause brain damage.

Iraqi reporter: Baghdad '100 times worse' than a year ago

Ayub Nuri, an Iraqi journalist residing in the United States, told CNN on Monday that even when he was last in Baghdad in 2006, "the situation was very, very dangerous," but that things are much worse now.

"When I speak to my friends and family these days on the phone, they tell me that it is 100 times worse than when I was there," Nuri stated. "Even the regular people cannot leave their own neighborhoods. ... If you go to another neighborhood, that's completely unknown to you, and you might not be able to come home alive."

When asked about General Petraeus' suggestion last week that "Iraqi soldiers and police are very much in the fight," Nuri replied, "I think that's not true at all. ... I have to be honest with you and with everyone else in the world. When I was traveling around Iraq, in Baghdad or anywhere else, I was afraid of the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police more than I was afraid of a militia or unknown men."

Nuri explained that after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded Saddam's army, "They were desperate to recreate another Iraqi army, and in case of desperation, of course, you accept anyone to join your army, and many of them were criminals, many of them were drug dealers, and many of them had ... affiliation only to their own areas." He said that as a result, many Iraqis these days would prefer to have their neighborhood patrolled by a US unit rather than an Iraqi unit.

"I personally do not have any faith or any hope in the Maliki government," Nuri stated, though he emphasized that the problem wasn't just with Maliki. "The Iraqi government is neither willing nor they are able to do anything," he concluded.

The Long Suffering of the Mauritanian Teenager Sent Home from Guantánamo

One of these innocent men, Mohammed al-Amin, who hails from an even more distant location -- the western Saharan country of Mauritania -- has just been released from Guantánamo, and his story, though brutal, is typical of the suffering that these men have been forced to endure for five and a half years. While reading it, remember that his is not a unique case, that hundreds of other innocent men have been treated in a similar manner, and that many of them still remain in Guantánamo. It is one thing to tout the 778 men who have been held in Guantánamo as "the worst of the worst," as the administration did when the prison was set up in January 2002, but it is quite another to realize that 431 of these men have now been released, and that a large number of them, like Mohammed al-Amin, were completely innocent of any wrong-doing.

In our worst nightmares we couldn't dream up this kind of torture... We owe the world an apology for the PNAC mentality of our 'leaders'!

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100807T.shtml

The Not-So-Small Price of Iraq By Dante Zappala
The Philadelphia Daily News

Monday 08 October 2007


Until recently, I thought America agreed that the death of over 3,800 troops in Iraq is a tremendous loss to this country.

My brother, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, is just one in that number. He was a soldier in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, and was killed in an explosion in Baghdad on April 26, 2004.

Sherwood, like other fallen heroes, was a leader in his community, a vital link in the fabric that binds us as Americans. His son, growing into a young man, has the loss etched into his long, penetrating stares. Who could look at him and say his father's sacrifice was, in actuality, not a large one?

A chorus of war enthusiasts is giving it a shot. House GOP leader John Boehner said it best when asked recently about the monetary and human price tag of the war. He categorized these costs as a "small price to pay."

A small price to pay. This is what coddling does to people--drives out any hint of empathy. You notice the people who gave us this war are not sending their kin to fight it.

Reporter For Post Is Fatally Shot In Baghdad

118 reporters have been killed in Iraq.

[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/26/AR2007102602402.html?hpid=artslot]'I Don't Think This Place Is Worth Another Soldier's Life'
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After 14 months in a Baghdad district torn by mounting sectarian violence, members of one U.S. unit are tired, bitter and skeptical.

By Joshua Partlow

BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 Their line of tan Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles creeps through another Baghdad afternoon. At this pace, an excruciating slowness, they strain to see everything, hoping the next manhole cover, the next rusted barrel, does not hide another bomb. A few bullets pass overhead, but they don't worry much about those.

"I hate this road," someone says over the radio.

They stop, look around. The streets of Sadiyah are deserted again. To the right, power lines slump down into the dirt. To the left, what was a soccer field is now a pasture of trash, combusting and smoking in the sun. Packs of skinny wild dogs trot past walls painted with slogans of sectarian hate.

A bomb crater blocks one lane, so they cross to the other side, where houses are blackened by fire, shops crumbled into bricks. The remains of a car bomb serve as hideous public art. Sgt. Victor Alarcon's Humvee rolls into a vast pool of knee-high brown sewage water -- the soldiers call it Lake Havasu, after the Arizona spring-break party spot -- that seeps in the doors of the vehicle and wets his boots.

This is the kind of article one of my friends will not admit nor read. Only "liberals" make this stuff up.

She has a nephew who is in Iraq and he says we are making a difference. Therefore EVERYONE else is wrong. She is very proud of him.

He supposedly emails home everyday with good news, he can go anywhere he wants to on the internet, and he can watch any news he wants. Everything that disputes that all that is a lie - according to her and her family who are staunch Bush supporters.

I hope he doesn't come home in a flag-draped coffin, sadie. Too bad his parents didn't teach him not to lie, too. OR they're lying to you about what he's actually saying in his communications with them.

Either way, the poor sod is screwed..by both his government and his parents.

Who has lost out in this war?

How about the ... 14 percent of Iraqis now displaced

This story reads like it was sung by a confused Ethel Merman:

Everything's Coming Up Roses
Except for the millions of homeless Iraqis.