Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Recent
Stories
August
6, 2003
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Resumé So Far
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
29, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
"Journalist Spotted! Journalist
Dead!" Guatemala Bleeds; US Press Yawns
Thomas
J. Nagy
The Belligerent Dr. Pipes
Kurt Nimmo
Tom Delay Goes to Jerusalem
Chris
Floyd
Dead Reckoning: Bush Warriors Sign Off on War Crimes
Robert
Fisk
Another Botched Raid; Another Massacre
Jason Leopold
Did Chalabi Help Write Bush's State of the Union Address?
Conn Hallinan
Food Bully: Bush's Biotech Shock and Awe Campaign
Dan
Bacher
Sacramento's War on Free Speech
Ray
McGovern
Cheney Chicanery
Website
of the Day
Julie Hilden Caught on Tape
July 26 / 27, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
Standard
Schaefer
Joblessness and the Invisible Hand
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
Hot Stories
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
5, 2003
Gulf
War II Syndrome?
Military
Equipment and "Pneumonia"
By
STAN GOFF
To understand the official military response to
the mysterious "pneumonia" breaking out among American
troops in Iraq, we have to understand that troops are equipment.
To the unremitting vexation of Donald
Rumsfeld and his "network-centric" techno-groupies,
troops are articles of equipment whose preparation and maintenance
prove troublesome. They have to be coaxed into "service"
with Army-of-One-style Madison Avenue pitches and educational
bribes, enculturated to discipline and punctuality, taught how
to perform their various functions, then kept in the job through
a system of economic and psychological rewards. Troops are the
only part of the "tables of organization and equipment"
(TO&E is the military's term to describe its units, not mine)
that have to be indoctrinated.
There are a couple of troublesome aspects
to this for the politicians who control the military. First,
troops are not equipment. Second, indoctrination narratives are
perishable as circumstances change.
I tend to harp about this, having been
military for so long and now being a very politically active
leftist, but no member of the armed forces is ever transformed
into the unthinking, unfeeling, lethal robot that thrills the
right and haunts the left. These men and women start and end
as human beings exactly like all of us. They experience the same
range of emotions, desire the same outlets for their creativity,
seek the same human companionship, and are driven by the same
intellectual curiosity. They are not computers that can be programmed.
They feel loneliness, awe, pain, lust, confusion, mirth, dread,
 appetites, and obsessions just like every
last one of us, and they exist in the same uncontrollable mix
of potentially subversive facts that we do. They are the same
combination of goal-directed willfulness and unmanaged acting-out
as the rest of us. They are part of the same system as you and
me, in which Wal-Mart workers and soldiers are both necessary
and expendable. Like the rest of us, they can also get mad when
they find they've been had.
They have to be given a special status,
reinforced by popular media, that equates their subservience
to heroism. They are dressed up in crisp uniforms so they can
be properly recognized and adored, and rewarded with colorful
medals and badges that hang like fetishes all over those uniforms,
and convinced that they are serving some sacred purpose even
when they are only slaking Wall Street and the Dollar with their
blood and sweat.
Troops might be bewildered, as we all
are, by ideologies of chauvinism, consumerism, gender, and so
on, but they're still exposed to all that contradictory stuff
that life presents them. In fact, troops are often exposed more
directly to the charlatan character of official horseshit than
the rest of us. As middle class white America comforts itself
with the cake-and-ice-cream of 'liberation' in Iraq, for example,
the troops who are the instruments of this wretched folly are
confronted each day with the generalized hostility of an occupied
people, and with the glaring fact that their senior officers--whom
they've been told to trust as leaders--are now professional hucksters
assisting with the sale of war to voters and taxpayers.
What troops often haven't had yet, and
what many don't have until after their tours of duty, is the
epiphany that they are equipment. Equipment with an expiration
date.
The Department of Defense does not care
if a soldier retires and dies three weeks later. In fact, the
Veterans Administration bean counters would see that as positive.
The Department of Defense does not care if a soldier who was
getting out anyway, finishes his or her three or four year hitch,
then comes down with mysterious and debilitating ailments, as
long as that ailment can plausibly be denied as "service-connected."
Note how many millions have been spent by the US government to
deny that Gulf War Syndrome existed, and how hard they've fought
liability for Agent Orange.
Now there is a "pneumonia"
breaking out among the troops, which may very well be related
to inhalation of microscopic particles of the highly toxic and
radioactive depleted uranium, a heavy-metal slag used in another
bit of expendable military equipment, US anti-tank ammunition.
The press, as per standing operating
procedure, is collaborating with the Department of Defense in
completely evading the possibility of DU as a causative agent
for the respiratory malady that has already killed two perfectly
healthy young men and has dozens of others hospitalized with
some on ventilators. CNN's medical reporter, Dr. Sanjay Gupta,
has made the claim that the morbidity rate is average for the
population, a claim copied directly from the Defense Department
playbook. This idiotic assertion, of course, accepts the premise
that this is one of the communicable pneumonias we all know and
love, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. There are
no disease clusters to indicate that an organism is responsible
for the problem at all, but this doesn't stop the spin machine.
Two of the over 100 cases have shown
strep, and this is boldly emphasized while the fact that ONLY
two have shown strep (which could very well be coincidental or
opportunistic infections) is underplayed. And the boilerplate
pre-emptive argument against toxic exposure as the source of
this outbreak is that there is "no evidence of toxic or
chemical exposure." What is not stated is that when the
most obvious etiology is deliberately overlooked, the "evidence"
is unlikely to appear on its own. The military made its mind
up some time ago that DU is not toxic or carcinogenic--flying
directly in the face of scientific fact as effortlessly as the
military's political bosses stated the bogus case of al Qaeda-Iraq
connections and WMD's.
The target audience for this kind of
chicanery is generally the US civilian population, but in this
case it is also the troops themselves. They cannot be allowed
to develop a preoccupation about the very dust they are relentlessly
exposed to every day, because that might degrade their ability
to perform their primary functions.
Whether or not this deadly inflammation
is the result of DU or some other environmental hazard, the troops
are being exposed to DU and a lot more nasty shit every day,
just like the troops from Desert Storm and its aftermath, and
they will likely eventually be disabled at more or less the same
rates--that would be upwards of 40 percent. Troops have become
a target audience for the pneumonia spin, because their expiration
dates are any time after Uncle Sam can extricate himself from
this tar baby he has encountered in Iraq. Until then, just to
cope with this arrogant overreach, Bushfeld is offering bribes
all over the world for spare troops and activating the Individual
Ready Reserve--a measure normally associated with direct defense
of the nation or general war.
In March the sandstorms dead-lined their
helicopters. Now something is dead-lining the troops. But the
troops are NOT equipment, in spite of what Donald Rumsfeld and
his whole techno-fascist entourage might like. We can tell them--and
I am telling them--you are being had.
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member
of the BRING THEM
HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces
master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email
for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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