Sunday, Jun 30th
Last update07:49:10 AM GMT
Military Glance
Because of flawed electrical work by contractors, the bulletin stated, soldiers at American bases in Iraq had received severe electrical shocks, and some had even been electrocuted.
Since that warning, at least two more American soldiers have been electrocuted in similar circumstances. In all, at least a dozen American military personnel have been electrocuted in Iraq, according to the Pentagon and Congressional investigators.
Cheated. Baited and switched. That's how veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan say they feel about military recruiters who sold them on how the GI Bill would benefit them.
"They kind of sell you a dream," she said after the rally. "You think you're going to get all of this stuff, and in reality, you don't get that. I just kind of believed what my recruiter told me, which is not the truth."
TVNL Comment; There is no bigger sucker than someone who joins the military these days. They are lied to about everything from the purpose of their mission to the terms of their benefits. One look at the number of homeless veterans in this country should have been enough to make these people understand that there is something wrong. But like most Americans, they don't believe that America can do any wrong, no matter how much evidence exists. (As is the case with American complicity in the events of 9/11.)
State Department investigators found that a subsidiary of a major defense contractor provided portions of the computer source code of Air Force One to a company in Russia in 1998, according to a little-noticed consent agreement reached earlier this month.
"The recent disclosures underscore the Bush administration's extraordinarily sweeping conception of executive power," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "The administration's lawyers believe the president should be permitted to violate statutory law, to violate international treaties, and even to violate the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. They believe that the president should be above the law."
For at least four years, since the 2004 presidential election when a veteran, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., was the Democratic Party nominee, the Department of Veterans Affairs has blocked efforts to help U.S. soldiers register to vote at its facilities in all 50 states.
"This is politically motivated voter suppression," said Scott Rafferty, an attorney based in Washington, D.C., who has fought the Veterans Administration (VA) in federal courts since 2004 over the right to assist veterans, including homeless vets, to register to vote at the VA campus in Menlo Park, California. "The VA is making its open campuses, even those where hundreds of homeless and aging veterans live, First Amendment-free zones."
TVNL Comment: What are they fighting for again?
The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat injuries and illness as of March 1. [VCS Note: There are nearly 61,000 non-fatal casualties from Iraq, plus 8,000 non-fatal casualties from Afghanistan. A grand total of 69,000 battlefield casualties from the two wars.]
A US Congress-appointed committee on Gulf War illnesses analysed more than 100 studies in the research.
It found evidence linking the problems to a particular class of chemicals.
These were an anti-nerve gas agent given to troops, pesticides used to control sand-flies, and the nerve-gas sarin that troops may have been exposed to during the demolition of a weapons depot.
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