This page will feature articles that have come across my desk. It will be like an internet magazine of articles that interest me (and may or may not interest you).

It Was Oil, All Along

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06272008/watch3.html
Saturday 28 June 2008
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from
weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be … the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir,”Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated
in an interview with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War.”

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. “We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie, “There Will Be Blood.” Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one
can get at it except for me!”

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could
get at the oil except … guess who?

Here’s a recent headline in The New York Times: “Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back.” Read on: “Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on
contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.”

There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that’s right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR
and Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places.

Let’s go back a few years to the 1990′s, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That’s when he told the oil industry that, “By 2010 we will need on the
order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately
lies.”

Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO’s and lobbyists
were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the
documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club
filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that’s enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

At a Congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, whom the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing
efforts to deal with global warming.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands
permanently wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips
says America has become little more than an “energy protection force,” doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of
Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood.” His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.

• * *

Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal,which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers . This comment was
presented on Friday 27 June 2008 on Bill Moyers Journal.

Rome: Churches appeal to world leaders to feed the hungry

“Give food to those who are dying of hunger because if you do not, you shall have killed them,” (Pope Benedict XVI)

This article speaks for itself, especially the statement by the head of World Council of Churches: “Human actions that are driven by greed have created poverty, hunger and climate change. Humanity must be challenged to overcome its greed.” (Rev. Samuel Kobia)

Ecumenical News International / 5 June 2008
By Peter Kenny

Rome, 5 June (ENI)--The world converged on Rome this week for an international summit on food and security, with some countries using it as a political platform, but the message from churches and faith communities was unequivocal: feed the hungry.

“Give food to those who are dying of hunger because if you do not, you shall have killed them,” warned Pope Benedict XVI in a message to the Food and Agriculture Organization that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, read at the Rome headquarters of the UN body dealing with food and agriculture.

The 3 to 5 June FAO summit sought to tackle skyrocketing food prices, and food shortages, as well as farming problems in some cases attributed to climate change as well as the use of grains in bio-fuel production, and rising energy consumption in emerging economies.

“Ensuring food security for all of the world’s people is among the greatest challenges facing humanity in the early years of the 21st century,” the Geneva-based World Council of Churches said in a statement commenting on the Rome summit.

“The WCC views the primary cause of the current crisis as inappropriate human actions, which have induced climate change and skyrocketing food prices,” declared the WCC general secretary, the Rev. Samuel Kobia. “Human actions that are driven by greed have created poverty, hunger and climate change. Humanity must be challenged to overcome its greed.”

The WCC head said that churches have an essential role to play on this issue, and to be effective they must face the global food crisis together.

Meanwhile, and commenting further on the general issue of global food and security, WCC general secretary Kobia commented, “While churches and agencies of Christian witness have provided important services in the past, there is so much more that we could achieve. Individually and collectively, the time has come for churches to reassess and strengthen their policies of advocacy and support in addressing this crisis.”

Sushant Agrawal, director of the Church’s Auxiliary for Social Action in India, said, “If God’s will was done, no one would go hungry.” Agrawal, who is also the moderator of the Geneva-based ACT International aid group, added, “The Lord’s Prayer highlights that having enough to eat is and has always been central to the Christian idea of a world shaped by justice and mercy.”

While the summit was taking place in Rome, churches around the world shared information about their work on the underlying causes of the current desperate situation. The World Council of Churches, ACT International, ACT Development and the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance asked those associated with them what campaigning they were taking around the food crisis, along with any humanitarian or long-term development assistance.

The Geneva-based groups said that at present 854 million people, representing one person in every eight, are hungry. The groups noted that, “The current crisis caused by rapid increase in food prices” could add another 100 million people to that count.

Separately, a coalition of more than 250 faith-based organizations attending the Rome summit called on the conference to launch an “effective, long-term multi-stakeholder process of discussion and action at national, regional and international levels, based on fundamental spiritual values in which civil society, including faith organizations, will play a full role”.

The groups circulated a statement to all delegations at the Rome summit. The signatory organizations include Roman Catholic religious orders, non-governmental organizations, a number of who have consultative status at the UN Economic and Social council, various churches, and ecumenical inter-church aid networks.

Their statement said, “Every faith tradition invites us both to feed the hungry and care for our environment and its myriad life forms … We also recognize the need to ensure that policies enacted by elected representatives and relevant international organizations contribute to an improved quality of life for every human person, each made in the image and likeness of God, and to the sustainability of ecosystems on which every living creature depends.”

Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success

By JON HURDLE
Published: May 20, 2008
New York Times

PHILADELPHIA — Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.

Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.

The farm earned about $10,000 on revenue of $450,000 in 2007, and hopes to make a profit of 5 percent on $650,000 in revenue in this, its 10th year, so it can open another operation elsewhere in Philadelphia.

In season, it sells its own hydroponically grown vegetables, as well as peaches from New Jersey, tomatoes from Lancaster County, and breads, meats and cheeses from small local growers within a couple of hours of Philadelphia.

The farm, in the low-income Kensington section, about three miles from the skyscrapers of downtown Philadelphia, also makes its own honey — marketed as “Honey From the Hood” — from a colony of bees that produce about 80 pounds a year. And it makes biodiesel for its vehicles from the waste oil produced by the restaurants that buy its vegetables.

Among urban farms, Greensgrow distinguishes itself by being a bridge between rural producers and urban consumers, and by having revitalized a derelict industrial site, said Ian Marvy, executive director of Added Value, an urban farm in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn.

It has also become a model for others by showing that it is possible to become self-supporting in a universe where many rely on outside financial support, Mr. Marvy said.

Mary Seton Corboy, 50, a former chef with a master’s degree in political science, co-founded Greensgrow in 1998 with the idea of growing lettuce for the restaurants in downtown Philadelphia.

Looking for cheap land close to their customers, Ms. Corboy and her business partner at the time, Tom Sereduk, found the site and persuaded the local Community Development Corporation to buy it and then rent it to them for $150 a month, a sum they still pay.

They made an initial investment of $25,000 and have spent about $100,000 over the years on items that included the plastic-covered greenhouses and the soil that had to be trucked in to cover the steel-and-concrete foundation of the old factory site.

“The mission was: How do you take postindustrial land and turn it into some kind of green business?” said Ms. Corboy, an elfin woman with the ruddy cheeks of someone who works long hours out of doors.

She approached her early lettuce-growing operation with conventional business goals and little thought for what an urban farm could achieve.

“I thought you didn’t have to have a relationship with the community,” she said. “You would just be a business person.”

Customers said the farm was a breath of fresh air in a gritty neighborhood.

“It’s a little piece of heaven,” said Janet McGinnis, 47, who lives on nearby Girard Avenue. “We live in the city, and it makes me feel good to wake up and see flowers.”

Ms. McGinnis said she could buy herbs, bread and produce elsewhere but did so at Greensgrow because it is part of the community. “We’ve got to keep it in the community,” she said. “We have to give back.”

Despite the community goodwill, the farm lives with urban problems like theft and violence. “I have gone through every tool in the box eight or nine times,” Ms. Corboy said.

Although no one at Greensgrow is getting rich from the operation — after 10 years’ work, Ms. Corboy is making an annual salary of $65,000 — there is a sense that their time has come.

“Ten years ago when I said we were going green, people thought we were out of our minds,” Ms. Corboy said. “Now we are top of the party list.”

Iraq Boy’s Family Describes Fatal Blast

Parents Tell ABC News About the US Bombing that Killed Their 2-Year-Old Boy
By MARCUS BARAM
May 2, 2008—

Just like any other day, the Hussein family was getting ready for lunch at their home in Baghdad, Iraq, when the house suddenly shook and the brick walls came down around them.

That was the dramatic account told to ABC News by the parents of 2-year-old Ali Hussein, the Iraqi boy killed during a fierce battle in Sadr City Tuesday.

Dramatic photographs of Hussein’s dust-covered body being pulled out of the rubble of his home appeared on front pages and TV news reports around the world.

When a U.S. patrol in the Shiite militia stronghold was fired on by a dozen fighters, American forces fired 200-pound guided rockets that devastated at least three buildings in the district.

The U.S. military said 28 militiamen were killed. Local hospital officials said dozens of civilians were killed or wounded.

Hussein’s mother recounted being buried in rubble and crawling around the home, looking for her children.

“I was crying, ‘My children, my children.’ I saw the house destroyed. I did not know if they are alive or not.”

When Hussein’s father could not locate Ali, he said he began frantically digging.

“Everyone felt desperate and the police have left the scene, but I kept on digging. I told them I will not leave my son. I will take him out. I felt fainted after two hours of digging.”

The fire brigade arrived to help him find Ali and remove him from the house, according to Hussein’s father.

“They gave him to me, run to the ambulance, I hold his hand in the ambulance and it was cold. They made the first aid thing to the kid, open his eye, the rescuer looked at me, I told him you’re a believer, and accepts the results.”

Hussein’s father recalled how over the last month and a half the boy used to come to the main door of the house, wanting to go out and play.

“Ali was pushing against my legs and tell me, ‘Baba, Baba.’ He wanted to go out, and I did not let him out due to the military actions ongoing.”

“Ali was 2 years old, still future was in front of him. Ali, if he has an opinion, he would have said, ‘I do not want to interfere in the struggle.,”

The parents called on both Shiite militias and the U.S. military to stop operations in the violence-torn district. And they criticized American military efforts that resulted in the deaths of civilians.

“You attacked civilians’ houses crowded with people for the sake of a few militants,” said Hussein’s father, his face in tears. “A considerable number of people were killed for the sake of killing four.”

Although the parents did not mention it, they may qualify for condolence payments, which are made for death, injury or battle damage resulting from U.S. military operations. Such payments can range from $2,500 per incident to $10,000 per incident in extraordinary cases.

As of Thursday, the Multi-National Division in Baghdad has not decided whether to open an investigation into the “alleged noncombatant deaths,” which could result in condolence payments to Hussein’s family, according to an e-mail to ABC News’ Ryan Owens from LTC Steve Stover, spokesman with the 4th Infantry Division.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Vision of Islam

By Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times / www.nytimes.com / , 2008

(Karachi, Pakistan)

Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim
teacher from Turkey.

He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags
painted on the floor for people to step on. The mosque near where he
works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere
assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.

“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of
Islam.”

But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of
Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating
back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest
parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public
school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable.

Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish
educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different
vision of Islam. Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting
with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace
Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now
established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian.

Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability
and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main
preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become
a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against
fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they
get.

At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis
cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but
require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children
to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer
free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical
agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public
schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a
new array of private schools.

The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan
since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on
their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce
the influence of Islamic extremists.

They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in
English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare.
They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is
required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they
encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in
lifestyle and prayer.

“Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam
Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their
religion as well.”

That approach appeals to parents in Pakistan, who want their children to
be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to
it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town
near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school,
because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam,
and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.

“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said,
sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them
modern education. PakTurk does both.”

The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah
Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69,
comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of
Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting
in trouble with secular Turkish officials.

Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns
to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world
to danger.”

The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took
its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s.
Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the
faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic
intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish
ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it.

In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with
radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and
the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin
Laden — the two approaches compete daily.

The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city
where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose
poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr.
Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost
as soon as he began. The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with
their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle
America.

“They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are
they drinking at night?’ “ said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the
school, who is Pakistani.

Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr.
Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing
their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic
saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.”
When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told
him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic.

“I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ “ Mr.
Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two
men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was
no difference between a tie and glasses.

“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of
Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”

That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the
poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from
a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running
water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission,
leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a
Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family.

“Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven
younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He
decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in
the Turkish school.

The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said
his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of
poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz,
means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal
education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction. Their
father was an imam.

His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents
are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is
constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for
flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the
teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory.

“They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They
are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll
deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”

Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said
Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina
University in Saudi Arabia.

In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is
less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the
Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children
attended madrasas.

Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But
when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications.
They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”

That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in
it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers.

“They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its
meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.

Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally
dependent on our education.”

In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen
put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious
leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their
fundamental interpretation of Islam. They use this to engage people in
struggles that serve their own purposes.”

Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to
advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish
intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen
“sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr.
Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run
the country.

Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had
extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker
assessment.

“The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of
power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the
Muslim world.”

But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic
caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal
of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more
than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim
secular Turks find highly suspect.

Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan
Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped
finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of
the Nigerian elite.

“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we
introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get
to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.

He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three
million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates,
and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.

The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are
not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote
interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as
Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say
they stress multiculturalism and universal values.

“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every
human being is very important.”

Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the
importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents
said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta,
said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he
belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job,
he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.

“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he
said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know
the faults are within us.”

An Open Letter to His Eminence Francis Cardinal George, OMI,

Archbishop of Chicago, P.O. Box 1979,Chicago, IL 60690–1979
by Bob Waldrop, Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, www.justpeace.org

March 26, 2008

Dear Cardinal George:

I have read the news reports and the Archdiocesan statement concerning the disruption of an Easter mass that you celebrated at your Cathedral. Your official statement says, in part. . . “This is a profoundly disturbing action. . . It is a sacrilege that should be condemned by all people of faith and good will.”

Although I actively oppose the unjust war the United States is waging on the people of Iraq, I agree that the demonstrators action was disturbing and sacrilegious.

However, theirs was not the first sacrilegious act of that day. The sacrilege commenced when you ascended to the Altar of God and began to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass with your hands dripping with the blood of the innocent in Iraq whom you and most of the other United States Catholic Bishops have so callously abandoned to their grisly and violent fates. Like the rest of the US Bishops save one, you issued no canonical declaration forbidding Catholics of the Archdiocese of Chicago from participation in the unjust war on the people of Iraq. A review of your website finds no pastoral letter instructing the souls entrusted to your care about the Church’s teachings on unjust war and condemning the war on the people of Iraq as unjust. Like nearly all of your confreres in the U.S. hierarchy, you have preached a gospel of moral relativism and moral laxism that makes a mockery of the Church’s teachings on life. You claim you want “peace”, but you have done nothing to actually support peace other than to offer pious platitudes and hypocritical rhetoric from your position of safety in your palatial Chicago residence.

Your holidays and festivals I detest, they weigh me down, I tire of the load. When you spread out your hands, I close my eyes to you; though you pray the more, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood! Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds before my eyes; cease doing evil, learn to do good. Make justice your aim, redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow. Isaiah 1

I am obviously just an obscure Catholic Worker. You and all the other bishops have consistently ignored everything I have had to say to you since I started writing bishops on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 2001. Which is fine with me, I am not interested in collecting letters of denial from bishops and cardinals making excuses for their moral cowardice. The charism of the Catholic Worker movement is faithfulness to the Gospel of Justice and Peace - even when all of the United States bishops save a small handful choose Nationalism over Catholicism. So once more I write again these words of inconvenient faithfulness, to remind you that God is watching every moment of your reign as Archbishop and Cardinal and you will one day be accountable for these actions.

God was watching when you refused to properly catechize your people about unjust war.

God was watching when you refused to forbid Chicago Catholics from participating in an unjust war.

God was watching when you dined with the Tyrant-Emperor George Bush, and you did not condemn him as a murderer and prosecutor of an unjust war.

A reading from the book of the Prophet Micah. . .

“And I said, Listen you leaders of Jacob, house of Israel! Is it not your duty to know what is right, you who hate what is good, and love evil? You who tear their skin from them and their flesh from their bones? They eat the flesh of my people and flay their skin from them, and break their bones. They chop them in pieces like flesh in a kettle, and like meat in a caldron. When they cry to the Lord, he shall not answer them, rather shall God hide from them at that time, because of the evil they have done.

Thus says the LORD regarding the prophets who lead my people astray; Who, when their teeth have something to bite, announce peace, But when one fails to put something in their mouth, proclaim war against him.

Therefore you shall have night, not vision, darkness, not divination; The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be dark for them.

Then shall the seers be put to shame, and the diviners confounded; They shall cover their lips, all of them, because there is no answer from God. . . .

Therefore, because of you, Zion shall be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem reduced to rubble, And the mount of the temple to a forest ridge.”

So as it turns out, when you condemn these young people, you condemn yourself.

Which is worse? A prince of the church who by any objective judgment is a moral coward who has preached a false gospel of moral laxism and relativism regarding an unjust war? Or a few young people, who hear the cries of the victims, and in despair act out in such a public manner? Is it not true that your own abject failure as a Cardinal Archbishop provoked these young people to such a rash action? Are you not, then, a “secondary disrupter” of your own Mass, and thus have a significant share in the responsibility for their deeds? Have not your actions — or rather, inactions — violated the inalienable rights of the people of Iraq to life? Who, then, is really at fault in this matter? These young protestors? Or a cowardly Cardinal Archbishop, who shuts his eyes, ears, and heart to the cries of the people of Iraq for justice and peace and is a scandal before the entire world?

I write these words to you, in remembrance of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and soldiers who have died in this unjust war on the people of Iraq. One day you will meet them and they will tell you of their terror, pain, and fear and they will ask you, “Why, in the name of God, did you not do something serious to stop this from happening?”

I pray that God has mercy on your soul and brings you to an understanding of the grave evil and moral disorders that you and the other United States Catholic Bishops foster and encourage by your moral cowardice in the face of this unjust war on the people of Iraq

Sincerely,

/sig/

Bob Waldrop
Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House
1524 NW 21st
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106
www.justpeace.org

Counting Iraqi Casualties & a Media Controversy

by John Tirman Editor & Publisher / February 14, 2008
EditorAndPublisher.com

One puzzling aspect of the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties. The scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its importance should be obvious. Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news pages of America. This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings, ideological agendas,and political vendettas.

The upshot is that the American public—and U.S. policy makers, for that matter—are badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort. As an academic interested in the war’s violence, I commissioned a household survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best professionals available—the Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere. Their survey of 1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the first 40 months of the war. The survey was extensively peer reviewed and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006.

The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush, during a press conference, called the results “not credible”) and stirred a very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods. By and large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper reports.

Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007. Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure—400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.

The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.” The American press completely missed this.

What some in the news media did not miss, however, was a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the Lancet article by the National Journal, the “insider” Capitol Hill weekly.

The attack, by reporters Carl Cannon and Neil Munro, which was largely built on persistent complaints of two critics and heaps of innuendo, was largely ignored—its circulation is only about 10,000—until the Wall Street Journal picked up on one bit of their litany: that “George Soros” funded the survey. “The Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers,” said the January 9, 2008, editorial (titled “The Lancet’s Political Hit”) and concluded: “the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable.” The editorial created sensation in the right-wing blogosphere and in several allied news outlets.

Let me convey what I thought was a simple and unremarkable fact I told Munro in an interview in November and one of the Lancet authors emailed Cannon the details of how the survey was funded. My center at MIT used internal funds to underwrite the survey. More than six months after the survey was commissioned, the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided a grant to support public education efforts of the issue. We used that to pay for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on. OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the survey. The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors,had contributed. And we had hoped the survey’s findings would appear earlier in the year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq. All of this was told repeatedly to Munro and Cannon, but they choose to falsify the story. Charges of political timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible. It was published when the data were ready.

The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch, followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed “fraud” which Munro and Cannon hinted. “$OROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM” was a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely anything stated was true.

The charges of “fraud” that were also central to the National Journal piece ere based on distortions or ignorance of statistical method, such as random sampling and sample size, or speculations about Iraqi field researchers fabricating data. Nothing close to proof of misdeeds was ever offered.The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors,but of course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges. Those charges were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the war. For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents; about 80 percent of the time they were. (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v. nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)

In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and operations passing grades.

Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers were
unreliable (“without U.S. supervision”) and that the Lancet authors “made it clear they wanted this study published before the election.” Both of those assertions are untrue. Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures, another falsehood, and “we’re getting it jammed down our throat by people who are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.”

The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated “without U.S. supervision” and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta “said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey,” which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors,demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of religious prejudice.

Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio of all other wars); estimates of new
widows (500,000 from the war); and the other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war). When I mentioned these things to him on the telephone, he literally screamed that such data didn’t matter, that the Lancet probe was “a hoax.” Lancet article authors also cite several cases where they were misquoted. The National Journal’s editors have been informed of their reporters’ misconduct and errors, and have not responded.

So the smear is complete—a “political hit” by the “anti-Bush billionaire,” complicity by anti-war academics, fraud by Muslims devoted to Allah—and repeated over and over in the right-wing media. Little has of this has appeared in the legitimate news media, apart from right-wing columnists like Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.

One might expect that such nonsense is obvious to neutral observers, but it constitutes a kind of harassment that scholars must fend off, diverting from more important work. Gilbert Burnham, the lead author on the Lancet article, runs health clinics in Afghanistan and East Africa, and is spending inordinate amounts of time responding to the attacks. Les Roberts, a coauthor, and I have both had colleagues at our universities called by Munro to ask if they would punish us for fraud. The OSI people have also been writing letters to set the record straight. Most important, Riyadh Lafta, who has been threatened before, may be in more danger due to these attacks.

As to the issue of the human cost of the war, even the legitimate press that has avoided this kerfuffle might be intimidated from taking on the issue in depth. The fact that the National Journal hatchet job and the MoH surveym appeared within days of each other sent a message to editors around the United States—one survey is “discredited” and one is legitimate. The treatment of the MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of the Lancet figure — forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys. The New York Times did run an editorial in early February about the dead in Iraq — the 124 journalists killed in the war. The topic of the war’s exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle. Even with all this fuss in January, no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major dailies. No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the
danger and difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect the American position, or might shed some light on U.S.war strategy, or might point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations. Remarkably, no curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us. That, in the end, may be the biggest injustice of all.

---

The following article on my friend Gordon Zahn struck me as timely because of our current campaign at Marquette, a Jesuit University and the Jesuit opposition to Gordon’s (at the time a professor at Loyola, a Jesuit univesity in Chicago) publication of his first book “Catholic Germans and Hitler’s War.”

A Man of Peace: Gordon C. Zahn, 1918–2007

by Michael W. Hovey

Commonweal /www.commonwealmagazine.org / February 15, 2008

On the night of John Leary’s funeral in Boston in August 1982, I ran into Gordon Zahn in Copley Square. His face was lined with tears. Young Leary, a Catholic pacifist and Harvard grad, had dropped dead
a few days before while jogging along the Charles River. He was twenty-four years old.

“I’m Mike Hovey,” I said, sensing Professor Zahn didn’t recognize me. “I lived with John at Haley House [the Boston Catholic Worker].” “Oh yes,” Gordon responded. “Have you eaten yet?” Then he invited
me for a drink and a bite. “I need some company,” he said. It was the beginning of a long friendship.

Gordon died at the age of eighty-nine on December 9, 2007, from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. He never cut an imposing figure. He dressed like a college professor, which he was, and his demeanor was modest and never overbearing. A hearing impairment that began in his mid-twenties made him strain to follow what others were saying, especially in groups. But whatever he lacked in physical stature, his moral consistency and personal courage made people pay attention.

His many contributions to the Catholic Church on issues of conscience and war, peace, and social justice will long outlive him. His writings as a Catholic “public intellectual”-for an audience both in and outside the academy-and his leadership in various peace organizations (he was a cofounder of Pax Christi USA) began early on. He was a conscientious objector during World War II. A letter he wrote at the time seeking support for his position from his archbishop in Milwaukee was never answered. That experience helped shape Zahn’s life mission, which was to draw attention to the church’s failure to
“speak truth to power” and to constructively engage leaders and the faithful in rediscovering the pacifist roots of early Christianity.

After the war, Gordon took a doctorate in sociology and began an academic career. He never married. As a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago, he wrote his first book, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars. In it he explored the role of the German Catholic hierarchy in Nazi Germany and how it generally counseled “prudence,” if not wholesale capitulation, in dealing with the authorities. Jesuit and Vatican officials alike tried to suppress publication of the book, but failed. While researching the topic on a Fulbright scholarship, Gordon discovered the story of a young Austrian farmer, Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to serve in the Nazi army and was beheaded for his conscientious objection in Berlin on August 9, 1943. Jägerstätter went to his death without the support of his pastor or his bishop, and he left behind a wife and four daughters.

Gordon’s In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter was published in 1964. The following year, Archbishop Thomas Roberts, SJ, of Bombay, drew attention to Jäegerstätter’s
example in a speech at Vatican II. That speech, together with lobbying by Gordon and other Catholic pacifists (among them Dorothy Day,Eileen Egan, and James Douglass) led the council to include support
for conscientious objection to war in Gaudium et spes-a significant change in Catholic teaching.

As Jägerstätter’s story became more widely known, thanks initially to Gordon’s book, growing numbers of people from around the world began to gather annually at Franz’s grave. Eventually, the church in
Austria opened the process for promoting his canonization. This past October, a major stage in that process was reached in Linz, Austria, when Jägerstätter was declared “Blessed,” a martyr for the faith. His daughters and his ninety-four-year-old widow, Franziska, were joined by more than five thousand others at the Mass of beatification. Unfortunately, Gordon was not able to attend because of his declining health.

In the 1980s, Zahn became a key consultant to the U.S. bishops’committee charged with drafting the pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response. Again, history was made
when the bishops wrote that pacifism and a commitment to Christian nonviolence are fully consonant with gospel principles, and thus legitimate positions for Catholics to take regarding war. Gordon’s
writings proved seminal in this declaration.

Gordon wrote several other books, including one on his experience in the Civilian Public Service during World War II, and another on British Royal Air Force chaplains. He also edited a collection of
Thomas Merton’s essays on war and violence. From 1950 to 1999, he wrote more than thirty articles and reviews for Commonweal, usually on issues related to peacemaking, but also on other disputed topics like the civil rights of homosexuals (which he defended), and women presiders at the Eucharist at the Milwaukee Catholic Worker house (which he opposed).

After retiring from teaching at the University of Massachusetts-Boston in 1982, Gordon ended his career as national director of the Pax Christi USA Center on Conscience and War in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I served as executive director. I learned much while seated at the master’s feet, including the importance of ending the day with a decent martini! May he rest in peace.

Testimony of a US ex-marine

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde
from Information Clearinghouse

31/01/08 “ACN” — -- “I’m 32 and I am a trained psychopathic murderer. The only things I can do are to sell youths the idea of joining the marines and kill. I am not able to keep a job. For me civilians are despicable people, mentally retarded and weak persons, a flock of sheep. I am their sheepdog. I am a predator. In the army they used to call me Jimmy, the Shark”.

That was part of the second chapter of the book Jimmy wrote three years ago, with the assistance of journalist Natasha Saulnier, and which was launched at the 2007 Caracas Book Fair. Cowboys of Hell is the most violent testimony that has been written thus far based on the experience of a former member of the Marine Corps, one of the first to arrive in Iraq during the 2003 invasion. A is determined to tell, as many times as necessary, what having been a merciless marine for twelve years meant to him and why the Iraq war changed him.

Jimmy participated as a panelist at the fair’s main workshop, which had a controversial title: “The United States, the Possible Revolution” and his testimony possibly had the strongest expected impact on the audience. He has his hair cut in the military style and wears sun glasses; he walks with martial air and he has his arms covered with tattoos. He looks just like what he used to be: a marine. But when he speaks he looks different: he is someone marked by a horrifying experience from which he tries to keep other unwary youths away. As he assures in his book, he has not been the only one to have killed people in Iraq; that was a permanent practice by his fellow men. Four years after having abandoned the war, he still feels he is being chased by his nightmares.

Q What do all those tattoos mean?

A I’ve got a lot of them. I was tattooed in the military. Here in my hand (he shows his thumb and his ring finger), you can see the Blackwater logo, the mercenary army founded where I was born, there in North Carolina. I had this one done in an act of resistance because marines are not allowed to tattoo the area between their wrists and their hands. One day the members of my platoon got drunk and we all had the same tattoo done: a cowboy with bloodshot eyes over several aces, representing death. It means exactly what is going on: “you killed somebody. “ On the right arm is the marines’ logo with the flags of the United States and Texas, where I joined the US armed forces. On my chest, here on the left side there is a Chinese dragon ripping the skin and which means that pain is our weakness leaving our body. What kills us makes us stronger.

Q Why did you say that you had met the worse people ever in your life in the US Marines?

A The United States only has two ways of using the marines: to undertake humanitarian missions and to kill. Over the 12 years I was with them, I never took part in humanitarian missions.

Q Before you went to Iraq you recruited youths for the marines. Can you describe a recruiting officer in the United States?

A A liar. The Bush administration has forced the US youths to join the armed forces and what the government basically does –and I did too—is trying to get people through economic incentives. During three years I recruited 74 youths who never told me that they wanted to join the armed forces because they wanted to defend their country or due to any patriotic reason. They wanted to get money to go to university or get a health insurance. So, I would first tell them about all those advantages and only in the end I would tell them that they will serve our homeland. I never happened to recruit the son of a rich person. In order to keep our job, we as recruiting officers, could not think of any scruples.

Q I understand that the Pentagon has been less demanding as to the requisites to join the army. What does that mean?

A recruiting standards have enormously been eased, because almost nobody wants to join in. Having mental problems or a criminal record is no longer a problem. Persons that have committed felonies can join the army; that include those who have been given over-one-year sentences, which is considered a serious crime. Also accepted are youths who have not concluded high school studies; if they pass the psychological test, they can join the army.

Q You changed after the war, but could you tell me about your feelings before that?

A I felt just like the other soldiers who believed what they were told. However, since I began my recruiting work I felt bad about it: as a recruiting officer I had to tell lies all the time.

Q But, you believed that your country was involved in a fair war against Iraq.

A Yes, Intelligence reports we received read that Saddan had weapons of mass destruction. Later, we found out that everything was a lie.

Q When did you find out you had been deceived?

A Once in Iraq, where I arrived in March 2003. My platoon was ordered to go to the places formerly controlled by the Iraqi army and we saw thousands of thousands of ammunitions in boxes bearing the US label; they were there since the US had supported the Saddan government against Iran. I saw some boxes with the US flag on them and I even saw American tanks. My marines—I was a sergeant with E-6 category, a staff sergeant, which is a higher rank and I had 45 marines under my command— would ask me why there were US ammunitions in Iraq. They couldn’t understand it. CIA reports said that the Salmon Pac was a terrorist camp and that we would find chemical and biological weapons there, but we found nothing. In that moment I began to think that our real mission in Iraq was focused on oil.

Q The most disturbing lines in your book are those in which you describe yourself as a psychopathic murderer. Could you explain why you said that?

A I was a psychopathic murderer because I was trained to kill. I was not born with that mentality. It was the Marines that trained me to be a gangster in the interest of US corporations, a criminal. They trained me to fulfill, without thinking, the orders of the President of the United States and bring him what he asked for, without any moral consideration. I was a psychopath because we were trained to shoot first and ask later, as an insane person would act, not a professional soldier that is to face another soldier. If we had to kill women and children, we would do it; therefore, we were not soldiers, we were mercenaries.

Q What specific experience of yours made you reach that conclusion?

A Well, there were some of them. Our mission was to go to different cities and guarantee security in the roads. There was an accident in particular—and many others as well—which really put me in a serious situation. It was about a car with Iraqi civilians. All intelligence reports said that those cars had bombs and explosives on board. That was the information that we received. When those cars approached our areas we made warning shots; when they did not slow down to the speed we indicated, we would shoot at them without ceremony.

Q You shot at them with your machineguns?

A Yes, We expected to see explosions every time we riddle the cars with bullets; but we never heard or see an explosion. Then we opened the car and all we found was people killed or wounded, not a single weapon, not a single Al Qaeda propaganda, nothing. We only found civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Q In your book, you also described how your platoon machine-gunned peaceful demonstrators. Is that right?

A Right. In the surroundings of the Rasheed Military Complex, South of Baghdad and near the Tigris River, there was a group of people staging a demonstration, right at the end of the street. They were youths; they had no weapons. So, when we advanced, we saw a tank parked on one side of the street, the driver told us that they were peaceful demonstrators. If those Iraqi people had had any violent intentions, they would have blown up the tank; but they did not. They were only staging a demonstration. That calmed us down because we thought that “if they were there to shoot at us, they had already had enough time to do so. “ They were standing about 200 meters from our patrol.

Q Who gave the order to shoot at the demonstrators?

We were told by the high command to keep watching those civilians, because many combatants with the Republican Forces had taken off their uniforms and were wearing civilian clothes to undertake terrorist attacks against US soldiers. The intelligence reports we received were known basically by every member in the commanding chain. All marines were well aware about the structure of the commanding chain that was set up in Iraq. I think that the order to shoot at the demonstrators came from high-rank US administration officers, which included both military intelligence agencies and governmental circles.

Q And what did you do?

A I returned to my vehicle, my Humvee (a highly equipped jeep) and I heard the sound of a shot over my head. My marines started shooting, so did I. We were not shot back, and I had already shot 12 times. I wanted to make sure that we had killed people according to combat requirements set by the Geneva Convention and the operational proceedings established in the rules. I tried not to look at their faces, I only looked for weapons, but I found none.

Q How did your superior officers react at that?

A They told me that “shit happens. “

Q And when your marines found out that they had been deceived, what was their reaction?

A I was second in command. My marines asked me why we were killing so many civilians. “ Can you talk to the lieutenant? “, the answer was “No”. But when they found out that it all was a lie, they were really mad.

Our first mission in Iraq was not aimed at offering humanitarian assistance, as the media said, but to secure oil fields in Bassora. In the city of Karbala, we used our artillery during 24 hours; it was the first city we attacked. I thought we were there to give the population food and medical assistance. Negative. We kept on advancing towards the oil fields.

Before arriving in Iraq we went to Kuwait. We got there in January 2003 with our vehicles loaded with food and medicines. I asked the lieutenant what we were going to do with all those supplies, since we had little room for us with so much stuff. He told me that his captain had ordered him to download everything in Kuwait. Shortly after that, we were ordered to burn everything, all the food and the medical supplies.

Q You have also denounced the use of depleted uranium…

A I am 35 years old and I only have 80 percent of my lung capacity left. I have been diagnosed a degenerative disease in my backbone, chronic fatigue and pains in my tendons. You know, I used to run 10 kilometers just because I liked to run, and now I can only walk between 5 and 6 kilometers every day. I am afraid of having children because of that. I got a swollen face. Look at this picture (He shows me the photo on his Book Fair credential). This photo was taken shortly after I returned from Iraq. I look like Frankenstein. I owe all that to depleted uranium, now you can imagine what is happening to the people in Iraq.

Q And what happened when you returned to the United States?

A They treated me as if I were crazy, as if I were a coward, a traitor.

Q Your superior officers have said that all you have revealed is a lie.

A There is overwhelming evidence against them. The US armed forces are finished. The longer the war, the bigger chance for my truth to be known.

Q The book you have presented in Venezuela has been published in Spanish and French. Why haven’t you published it in the United States?

A The publishing houses have requested the elimination of real names of the people involved and the presentation of the war in Iraq in sort of a mist that makes it less crude, and I am not willing to do that. Publishing houses like New Press, an alleged left wing entity, refused to publish the book because they fear to be involved in a dispute raised by the people described in the story.

Q Why some media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post never reproduced your testimony?

A I never echoed the official version of the facts, which says that US troops were in Iraq to help the people; I never repeated their story that civilians there died in accidents. I refused to say that. I did not see any accidental shooting against the Iraqi and I refused to lie.

Q Have you changed that stance?

A No. What they have done is to add opinions and books by people with conscious objections: those who are against the war in general or those who participated in the war but who did not have this kind of experience. They are still reluctant to look straight to reality.

Q Do you have any photos or documents that may prove what you have told us?

A No, I don’t. They stripped me of all my belongings when I was ordered to return to the United States. I returned home only with two weapons: my mind and a knife.

Q Do you think there is a short-time solution to the war?

A No, I don’t think so. What I see is the same policy being practiced either by democrats or republicans. They are the same thing. The war is a business for both parties, since they depend on the Military Industrial Complex. We need a third party.

Q Which one?

A the party of Socialism.

Q You have participated in a workshop titled “The United States: The Revolution is Possible. “ Do you really think that a revolution could take place in the United States?

A It has already begun to take place in the South, where I was born.

Q But southern United States has traditionally been the most conservative zone in your country.

That changed after Katrina. New Orleans looks like Baghdad. The people in the South are indignant and they wonder every day how comes that Washington invests in a useless war and in Baghdad, while it has not invested in New Orleans. You must recall that the first big rebellion in the United States started in the South.

Q Would you be willing to visit Cuba?

A I admire Fidel and the Cuban people, and if I am invited to visit, for sure I would. I do not mind what my government might say to me. Nobody will control me.

Q Do you know that the symbol of US imperial despise against our nation is precisely a photo depicting some marines as they urinated on the statue of Jose Marti, who is the Cuban National Independence Hero?

A Yes, I do. In the Marine Corps they spoke of Cuba as a US colony and they taught us some history. As part of his training, a marine must learn facts about the countries he is expected to invade, as the song goes.

Q What song, the marines´ song?

A (singing) “ From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli…”

Q That means that the marines want to be in all parts of the world?

A Their dream is to control the world…, no matter if in that effort we all are turned into murderers

What’s your consumption factor?

By Jared Diamond The New York Times
Wednesday, January 2, 2008

To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: It’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences. To understand them, consider our concern with world population.

Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce. If most of the world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate.

The estimated 1 billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative
per-capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1 .The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem.

Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of the 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

People who consume little want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying their consumption by 32.

Among the developing countries that are seeking to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, four times the United States population. The world is already running out of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for oil and metals on world markets.

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption - that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world
metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase eleven-fold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies - for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy - they too will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only 1 billion people.

Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate Americans already have. To tell them not to try would be futile. The only approach that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow
for raising China’s consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster? No, we could have a stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: There is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields - even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

The same is true of forests: We already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. Yet most forests are managed
non-sustainably, with decreasing yields.

Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.

Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had
followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Also in the last year, concern about climate change has increased
greatly in the United States. Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of
California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and
Steel.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/02/opinion/ediamond.php

At Christmas, Iraqi Christians Ask for Forgiveness, and for Peace

New York Times / www.nytimes.com / December 25, 2007

By Damien Cave

Baghdad — Inside the beige church guarded by the men with the AK-47s, a choir sang Christmas songs in Arabic. An old woman in black closed her eyes while a girl in a cherry-red dress, with tights and shoes to match, craned her neck toward rows of empty pews near the back. “Last year it was full,” said Yusef Hanna, a parishioner. “So many people have left — gone up north, or out of the country.”

Sacred Heart Church is not Iraq’s largest or most beleaguered Christian congregation. It is as ordinary as its steeple is squat, in one of Baghdad’s safest neighborhoods, with a small school next door.

But for those who came to Sacred Heart for Mass on Christmas Eve, there seemed to be as much sadness as joy. Despite the improved security across Iraq, which some parishioners cited as cause for hope, the day’s sermon focused on continuing struggles.

Iraq’s Christians have fared poorly since the fall of Saddam Hussein, with their houses or businesses frequently attacked. Some priests estimate that as much as two-thirds of the community, or about one million people, have fled, making Sacred Heart typical. Though a handful have recently returned from abroad, only 120 people attended Mass on Monday night, down from 400 two years
ago.

The service began with traditional hymns. Some songs were sung in Aramaic, the language of Jesus. It was a reminder of the 2,000-year-old history of Iraq’s largest Christian group, the Chaldeans, an Eastern Rite church affiliated with Roman Catholicism.

Initially the sermon seemed equally traditional, beginning as many do with phrases like “This day is not like other days.”

Yet the priest, the Rev. Thaer al-Sheik, soon turned to more local themes. He talked about the psychological impact of violence, kidnapping and a lack of work. He condemned hate. He denounced revenge.

“We must practice being humane to each other,” he said. “Living as a Christian today is difficult.”

A few moments later he asked, “If the angel Gabriel comes today and says Jesus Christ is reborn, what do we do? Do we clap or sing?”

His parish, quiet and somber — with the drab faces of a funeral, not a Mass on Christmas Eve — took the question seriously. And responded.

“We ask him for forgiveness,” said a woman, her head covered by a black scarf. Her voice was just loud enough for everyone to hear.

Then another woman raised her voice. “We ask for peace,” she said.

Father Sheik looked disappointed. “We are always like beggars, asking God for this or that,” he said. “We shouldn’t be this way. First, we should thank God for giving us Jesus Christ. He would say, ‘I came to live among you. I want to teach you how to be compassionate. I want to teach you how to be more humane.’”

The people listened intently. No one smiled.

Communion followed. A stream of people — the choir’s keyboardist, a woman in black with eyes pink from crying through the service, an attractive young woman in thick makeup — came forward. They moved slowly down the center aisle, stepping onto what appeared to be Persian rugs, a few feet from an artificial Christmas tree in the corner with flashing red and green lights.

A woman ran wooden rosary beads through her fingers, which without the small cross on the end, looked exactly like Muslim prayer beads.

And among some, there was hope. Mary Hannawi, 50, said before the service that coming to church always made her happy, regardless of the circumstances outside its guarded walls.

But even Father Sheik could not resist asking God for a little help. He ended his sermon with a request that all Iraqis would love to see fulfilled.

“We call on God for equality, freedom — an end to war and an end to hunger,” he said. “We only demand from God peace for all of you.”

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Wisam A. Habeeb contributed reporting

Following Conscience

AMERICA MAGAZINE
By The editors | DECEMBER 10, 2007
In the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, reports the Army Officer’s Guide, “the emperor or empress had a medal that was awarded to officers who, by disobeying orders, turned the tide and won important battles. In the U.S. Army,” it continues, “of course, there is no such medal: this sort of judgment, wrapped within a full, disciplined understanding of the legal and moral impact of decisions, is expected.”

Elizabeth D. Samet reflects on this passage in her recently published account of teaching literature at West Point, Soldier’s Heart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Principled disobedience to orders has always been difficult, even when it is not just permitted, but required by law. The logic of battle, and so of military discipline, weighs heavily in favor of obedience to command. After the Vietnam War and atrocities like My Lai, the Army and Marine Corps took pains to train their personnel in responsible obedience. By the early 1990s, however, senior officers were already troubled that a new generation did not share their commitment to “military honor.” The so-called war on terror, shaped by the belief that terrorism changed all the rules, and then the protracted war in Iraq, with the uncertainties of counterinsurgency warfare along with the battle fatigue that comes with repeated rotations of the same people into combat, have made conscientious objection even more difficult. In our day, judgment “within a full, disciplined understanding of the legal and moral impact of decisions” has become more difficult to realize and still harder to implement.

Much of the difficulty has been created by civilians at the top of the chain of command. Assertions that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the war on terror paved the way for atrocities like Abu Ghraib. Talk that asymmetrical warfare demands relaxing established constraints on what might be done in combat and that new forms of unconventional warfare require “new,” undefined responses contributed to a climate of permissiveness. Some in the military, especially military lawyers, to their credit, did their best to hold the line for observance of the laws of armed conflict. But against the White House, the Justice Department and the office of the Secretary of Defense, it was an uphill battle. It fell, as it inevitably does in all wars, to conscientious officers and enlistees to stand up for the rules of war. With a volunteer military in need of men and women to fight in Iraq, however, the military has grown increasingly resistant to granting conscientious objector status to soldiers and marines. (See “A Soldier’s Decision,” America, 1/29.)

Pleas for C.O. status, dissenting from all war, often emerge from repugnance at the repeated horrors of battle. It is understandable that the experience might turn some individuals against war altogether. For Catholics, however, the issues are more complex. Catholic teaching requires disobedience to immoral orders. In their recent statement, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. bishops not only affirmed the duty of Catholics “to oppose torture [and] unjust war”; they went further, affirming the right of citizens not just to reject participation in all war, but also to resist serving in “a particular war, or a military procedure” by what is known as selective conscientious objection. While the law and military regulation make allowance for conscientious objection, neither law nor judicial decision permit it to be selective. Over the years, the U.S. bishops have repeatedly urged legalization of selective conscientious objection.

The moral confusion and ethical dilemmas brought on by the U.S. war in Iraq point to the need for legalization of S.C.O. For as the Catholic Peace Fellowship advises potential objectors already serving in the military, “Somebody might refuse to fight in Iraq, believing it to be an unjust or immoral war, but would not be opposed to fighting in a war of defense. [Such selective] conscientious objection is NOT legal, and an S.C.O. would face jail time.”

Logically, the case for S.C.O. should be stronger than the argument on behalf of a dispensation for consistent pacifists, since S.C.O. is a corollary of the just war tradition. If it is permissible to wage a just war, then it is forbidden to wage an unjust war or execute an immoral order. S.C.O. can be said, in fact, to uphold the system; it guarantees the integrity of the military. And the claim that S.C.O. endangers the national defense and the good order of the military is obviously fallacious, for it argues in effect that to support just wars, one must support unjust wars and immoral uses of force as well. Indeed, legalization of selective conscientious objection may add to the pressures that prevent political and military leaders from prosecuting unjust wars of choice, such as the Iraq war was at its inception.

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Primitive impulses of war

James Carroll
Boston Globe
November 12, 2007

THE INTERPLAY of religion and violence is considered by some a mark only of primitive culture. When the jihadist cries “God is Great” before detonating his explosive vest, or when, conversely, the Crusades are invoked to justify assault on radical Islam, secular critics can indulge a satisfying sense of superiority over believers, clinging to holy war.

In the United States, the once common religious references of the Bush administration - the war on terrorism defined in categories of good and evil, for example - seem discredited, if only by failures of policy. War-justifying appeals to the rhetoric of faith are suddenly out of fashion, but that does not mean that a subliminal link between religion and violence no longer exists. The “secular” is not all that secular.

In archaic religion, violence and the sacred were explicitly joined. That fact is significant because archaic religion is itself the source of culture, which is why violence - acknowledged to be irrational, yet perceived as virtuous - remains a mark of the human condition.

Take one example. The boundary between animals and humans is drawn by what the anthropologist René Girard calls the “victimary process,” the deliberate selection of an innocent outsider to undergo elimination for the sake of the community. The “scapegoat mechanism” in Girard’s phrase, by which generalized antipathy toward a chosen victim is acted out, serves to quench an otherwise insatiable animal appetite for violence.

This form of violence, that is, amounts to a control on violence. “Redemption” is the social calm that follows on the elimination of violent urges when they are “appeased” through ritualized killing. A social need is satisfied. Sacrificial violence (whether directed at an Aztec virgin, or the goat of Leviticus or Jesus) serves the cause of peace. This process becomes “religious” when the social need is attributed to a deity, to whom the victim is “offered.”

Despite the secular assumption that such impulses belong to a primitive past, they are universally at work whenever humans go to war. This comes clear with a closer look at the event commemorated in Europe and America this week - World War I.

The greatest mystery of that conflict was how the high commands of both sides could have so long persisted in the evident futility of infantry assaults across No Man’s Land against defensive lines that were, finally, never breached by either side. Technology (the machine gun) totally favored defense, but commanders never yielded their absolute preference for offense because the waste of life was, to them, no waste.

That millions of soldiers died for no discernible purpose can be explained only by the irrational belief in the salvific power of sacrifice as such. The Tommies, Micks, Jocks, Doughboys, Frogs, and Jerries who went endlessly “over the top” only to be mowed down were, in effect, a legion of scapegoats.

The nations that glorified them were in the grip of a displaced faith in the power of sanctioned death, operating in a realm apart from any conceivable war aim. The trenches became Europe’s altar. A brutal god was being appeased. Otherwise, parents would never have sent their innocent sons off to that carnage. Their innocence was the point.

The scapegoat mechanism shifted in World War II from soldiers to civilians, whose innocence was even sharper. The masterpiece form of this dynamic was, of course, the Nazi genocide of Jews.

That crime was unique, but the mass bombing of civilian population centers was, under all the “strategic” justifications, also an exercise in the irrational belief that bloody sacrifice for its own sake could somehow be redemptive. There is no other way to account for the all-out spasm of killing from the air that marked the last six months of the Allied war effort, especially in Japan.

The primitive impulses of our ancestors live on in us. War always operates at two levels - one apparent and rational, the other hidden and irrational. At a certain point, the first gives way to the second, which is why the violence of war inevitably continues past points of tactical and strategic meaning.

Sacrifice for its own sake takes on mystical significance that, in a secular age, can no longer be described - or defended. But it can be discerned, for example, in the anguished hope that troops will not have died in vain if others follow them. Once these subliminal currents are openly acknowledged, they can finally be left behind. In America lately, God is banished as an open sponsor of the war, but if God does not will this slaughter of innocents, who does?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

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St John Chrysostom, Almsgiving, and Persons with Disabilites

by Ephrem Gall In Communion, Fall 2007

St. John Chrysostom, having sought the face of God through the strictest forms of asceticism in the mountains near Antioch, only to find his health fail in the process, returned to the city. He rose through the deaconate of service to the poor to the priesthood, where his gift for preaching made him “the right hand man” of the archbishop. His faith and talents were noticed. Eventually he was chosen for the archbishop’s throne in Constantinople.

Among the vices which he encountered in the capital, St. John found that the many destitute persons of the city were being neglected or altogether ignored. He responded by delivering sermons that to this day remain among the most powerful expositions of the Christian faith. One of his major themes was the challenge to recognize Christ in the poor.

Many were brought to repentance, but St. John also made many powerful enemies, including the Empress. Eventually he was sent into exile. His fragile health failed on the way to a remote place of banishment. His life in this world ended on September 14, 407.

St. John usually worked his way through a book of Holy Scripture from beginning to end. In the latter part of each homily, he would apply the Scriptural content to an aspect of contemporary life. Two of his major subjects were, negatively, denunciations of time wasted on entertainment, especially the theater, which some preferred to Church services, and, positively, the encouragement of almsgiving, not only in the monetary sense, but the gift of time and attention to those in need.

It’s not difficult to relate his exhortations to those tempted by the allurements of popular culture. As to the other matter, the poor are still very much with us. So let us pay attention to his words on almsgiving.

While many of St. John’s exhortations encourage giving money to the destitute, one also finds passages in his sermons that bring out the deeper aspects of almsgiving, involving a more comprehensive approach to the support of those with special needs, such as persons with developmental disabilities.

Commenting on the text in First Corinthians: “Not many mighty, not many noble are chosen. Rather, God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise,” St. John says, “Persons of great insignificance are chosen to pull down boasting.” He warns the self-confident that it is faith that saves, not one’s reasoning ability. In fact, lines of reasoning can lead one into subtle traps away from God. “The Faith, received with trust, is a sure foundation. As the Lord says, we must become like a child.” And so the “insignificant,” simpler people are not objects of pity, but the bearers of a frame of mind that is essential for all of us to acquire.

As Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). St. John comments that jostling for position, vanity, and ambition are foreign to a childlike disposition. Children are generally uncomplicated and humble, and eager to be taught. St. John says the Lord means by “children” grown men and women who are “simple and lowly, and abject and contemptible in the judgment of the common sort.”

Those of us who work in group homes and other settings with persons having developmental disabilities can attest to the way that the simple, straightforward, and trustingly appreciative character of these people brings us down to earth. While there are irritations involved, in the end we receive, within ourselves, more than we give. Simply the words, “Good night, I love you,” repeated night after night, water a seed within our souls.

Persons with developmental disabilities typically exemplify, into their adult years, the childlike qualities Jesus calls for. They are icons by which these qualities may be learned. But often their simplicity is despised in the community, for cleverness serves to advance selfish ambitions that retain a fierce grip on the heart unless the cross and the Kingdom are seized “with violence.” Persons with developmental disabilities thus often suffer neglect to the detriment of their sense of belonging and their development, or socialization, and those who ignore and neglect them, unless they repent, face the judgment of God.

St. Paul, speaking of roles in the Body of Christ, writes, “The parts of the body which seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22). In a homily on that text, St. John asks, “What in the body is more insignificant than a hair?” Yet the removal of eyelashes or eyebrows not only endangers the eyes, but endangers their function. Showing greater honor is urged toward weaker members, St. John says, so “that they might not meet with less care.” The result is “equal sympathy.” But these dynamics do not operate automatically; effort is needed.

The gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12:8–10 are a non-exhaustive list that shows the dimensions of almsgiving. St. John asks, in homily 32 on 1 Corinthians, “What is, ‘helps?’ … To support the weak … this too is a gift of God.” Helping, he says, must flow from real sympathy, which leads to a bond of charity and a thorough, mutual fervency between helper and helped, resulting in friendship.

Friendship Community residents in Millersville, Pennsylvania

Money sent to pan-Orthodox ministries is certainly almsgiving, but it cannot take the place of face-to-face involvement in one’s family, parish, and community. “By developing such bonds of hand and heart,” St. John says, “one becomes “a loving and merciful soul, a fountain for all his brethren’s needs.”

Day-to-day life and friendship with persons with developmental disabilities has its moments of mutual fervency and celebration – birthday parties are major events – as well as its stresses, but these stresses can ultimately be related to the Cross, through which “joy comes into all the world.”

The efforts that are made in a group home to honor all the successes which our friends with disabilities struggle to achieve in daily living provide a premonition of the disproportionate “eternal weight of glory” our Lord has promised to His faithful strugglers. In saying “Well done!” to the proper setting of a dinner table, we see the great Banquet of God coming into view. Frequent, sincere commendations of our friends as well as asking their forgiveness when we have misunderstood them have been key elements to the maintenance of our mutual fervency.

In the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, St. John identifies the dealers of oil as the poor, and the oil is alms. He warns against wasting goods for “luxury and vainglory. For before Christ’s judgment seat you will have need of much oil … Let us contribute wealth, diligence, protection, and all things for our neighbor’s advantage. Nothing pleases God so much as to live for the common good.”

St. John refers to the parable of the sheep and the goats before Christ’s glorious throne of judgment (Matt. 25) as “this most delightful portion of Scripture, unto which we do not cease continually revolving.” He asks why brethren would be called “least,” and responds that “the lowly, the poor, and the outcast” are the sort that the Lord most greatly desires to “invite to brotherhood.” The Lord’s way of valuing people is contrary to what is typical in human society.

In his homily on St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians, St. John Chrysostom asks whether his hearers would rather take part in a sumptuous banquet with the rich and famous or enjoy a simple meal with the poor and those with disabilities. He gives his reasons for choosing the latter. I encourage you to find and read that homily in its entirety, to discover his entire answer and to enjoy a full meal of St. John’s golden words. (“Chrysostom” means golden-mouthed.)

Almsgiving affects one’s personal transformation as well. St. John says, “There is no sin, which alms cannot cleanse; it is a medicine adapted to every wound.” Genuine, sympathetic almsgiving heals the giver as well as the receiver. He also says, “Let us hold fast to Mercy: she is the teacher of that higher Wisdom.”

He explains that habitual attention to suffering leads to being able to bear slights, and finally, to the love of enemies. “Let us learn to feel for the ills our neighbors suffer, and we shall learn to endure the ills they inflict.” Contributing to the full socialization of others, including persons with developmental disabilities, leads to one’s own transformation into the likeness of the Lord Jesus. (Homilies 14 and 25 on the Acts of the Apostles)

St. John Chrysostom exhorts us all:

If you ever wish to associate with someone, make sure that you do not give your attention to those who enjoy health and wealth and fame as the world sees it, but take care of those in affliction, in critical circumstances, who are utterly deserted and enjoy no consolation. Put a high value on associating with these, for from them you shall receive much profit, and you will do all for the glory of God. God Himself has said: I am the father of orphans and the protector of widows [Ps. 67:6]. (Baptismal Instructions, 6.12; Paulist Press, 1963)

There is much in St. John Chrysostom’s words for us to reflect upon. He expresses an Orthodox Christianity that is robust and compassionate. A fuller study of his exhortations reveals a standard of personal commitment, relinquishment, and community that has monastic roots. Yet, while he could be thunderous in his denunciations, he often gently gave suggestions on how to approximate the narrow way he held high, such as recommending a simple, no-frills lifestyle focused on generosity, and the monastic life for those who are able to accept that calling. Much more could be said on his practical exhortations to married couples and families. See St. John Chrysostom on Marriage and Family Life (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press).

We are all disabled in some way, by sin and in our weaknesses, which mercifully drive us from
narcissism to community. And we all have a special intelligence given to us by God to contribute to the community. As we discern our communion in the Body of Christ, let us remember this aspect as well.

Ephrem and his wife Margaret are house parents of a Friendship Community group home for persons with developmental disabilities in Millersville, Pennsylvania. They are also members of St. John Chrysostom Orthodox Church in York, where they were chrismated in 2000. Ephrem has written a thesis for the Antiochian House of Studies, “St. John Chrysostom and the Socialization of Persons with Developmental Disabilities,” which is available on the “About” section of the web log “Arms Open Wide: Orthodox Christian Disability Resources” (http://armsopenwide.wordpress.com). A good resource on St. John Chrysostom’s life and writings is found online at www.chrysostom.org/life.html.

From the Fall 2007 issue of In Communion / IC 47

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The Tablet (London) / http://www.thetablet.co.uk / 20 October 2007

Franz Jägerstätter: A hard history to face

by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

Sixty-four years after he was beheaded by the Nazis in 1943 for refusing to bear arms in Hitler’s army, Franz Jägerstätter, a farmer from Upper Austria, is to be beatified in Linz on Austria’s National Holiday, 26 October. The beatification is a belated recognition of a controversial martyr.

Franz Jägerstätter is the first Austrian layman to be beatified for putting his faith before the Fatherland during the Second World War. But as well as recognising his own remarkable faith and opposition to Nazism, Friday’s beatification also signifies a change in the way Austrians deal with the past. For years they were not prepared to confront the support of their countrymen for Hitler, nor the lack of opposition to Nazism by the Catholic Church. Franz Jägerstätter’s stand against fascism, in being so unusual, was a disconcerting truth.

Jägerstätter was born out of wedlock in St Radegund, a village on the Austro-Bavarian border, in 1907. His parents were both young farmhands. His father was killed during the First World War and his mother later married a smallholder, Heinrich Jägerstätter, who adopted Franz and eventually left him his farm.

In his early twenties, Franz left home to work in a Styrian iron mine for three years, but he remained a committed Catholic and never lost contact with his parish priest. On his return home, he considered joining a religious order but in 1935 met his future wife, Franziska, whom he soon married. Their marriage was a happy one. Franziska was deeply religious and they often read the Bible and discussed religious issues together. Franz was a devoted father to the three daughters who were born to them in rapid succession (the only father in the village who was proud to push a pram, something considered unusual in those days).

Their happiness was, however, overshadowed by Hitler’s rise to power and the political turbulences it brought with it. From the beginning, Franz both saw through and rejected National Socialism. He refused all cooperation with the National Socialists and left the voluntary fire brigade when the members began to collect money for the party, saying he could always help to put out fires without being a member. He also refused to apply for state compensation after a hailstorm and declined child benefits for his children. In Hitler’s 1938 plebiscite on whether Austria should be annexed to Germany, he was the only person in his village to vote “no”- only days previously the Austrian bishops had called on all Catholics to vote in favour of annexation and had commended the National Socialist Party for its battle against Bolshevism. “It is an obvious national duty for us bishops to declare ourselves as Germans for the German Empire, and we expect all faithful Christians to know what they owe their people,” the bishops appealed.

After the outbreak of war in September 1939 the Austrian bishops again appealed: “In these decisive hours we encourage our Catholic soldiers to obey the Führer and do their duty.” The then Bishop for the Forces, Justus Rarkowski, even told his troops, “It is God Himself who is behind what the Führer commands.”

In October 1940 Jägerstätter was called up and had to swear the unconditional oath of allegiance to Hitler that was demanded of all German soldiers, but after six months’ basic training he was sent home as farmers were needed to maintain the food supply. He had meanwhile joined the Franciscan Third Order and, encouraged by his wife, went to Communion daily, something relatively rare at the time. The reports he received from friends and relations on home leave from the Russian front of the atrocities being committed by the Germans in the East, as well as events at home, deeply disturbed him. Eight of the 11 priests in his deanery had been arrested by the Gestapo and news reached him that disabled and mentally disturbed patients were being killed at the castle of Hartheim because the Nazis considered them “unworthy of life”.

By the time Jägerstätter was called up again two years later, he had made up his mind that he was not prepared to bear arms for an evil regime. Unlike many Austrian Catholics at the time, including several of Austria’s bishops, he did not fall for the Nazi propaganda which described the Russian campaign as a crusade against Bolshevism. “It is very sad to hear Catholics say that the war Germany is waging is perhaps not that unjust because it will wipe out Bolshevism. The big question is: are we fighting Bolshevism or the Russian people? If we are only fighting Bolshevism in Russia, why are Russian resources like iron and oil and the fact that their soil is so good for growing wheat playing quite such an important role in this campaign?” he later wrote home from prison. Jägerstätter was, however, prepared to serve as a medical orderly in the German army and both he and his wife hoped until the end that this might be possible.

He would also have been prepared to take up arms to defend Austria against attack, as his letters show, but he was not prepared to do so for what his Christian conscience told him was an evil purpose. “Is it all the same to people these days whether a war is just or unjust? If I hadn’t read so many Catholic journals and books I, too, might have come to that conclusion. But is there anything worse than having to murder people who are defending their country only in order to help an anti-religious power win this war so that it can found a godless empire?”

His relations and friends begged him to change his mind as his refusal to bear arms meant certain death. Jägerstätter consulted several priests who all told him that his first duty was to his wife and children. He also consulted his bishop, the then Bishop of Linz, Joseph Fliesser, who assured him that it was permissible to follow one’s conscience,but then spent over an hour impressing on him that it was his duty to obey his superiors and to think of his family. Jägerstätter could see that the bishop feared he might be a Gestapo spy. All the parishes in the diocese had been searched by the Gestapo, which was highly suspicious of the Catholic clergy. When Jägerstätter came out of the bishop’s office, he said to his wife, “The bishops don’t really dare say anything for fear it may be their turn next.”

In 1990 the original copy of his death sentence turned up in archives in Prague. The official verdict was “Wehrkraftzersetzung”, or the “undermining of military morale”. The document states clearly why he was sentenced to death: “The accused declared that it would be against his religious conscience to fight for the National Socialist state … but that he was prepared to serve as a medical orderly for reasons of Christian solidarity.” When she visited her husband in prison in Berlin, Franziska even plucked up the courage to ask his court- appointed defence lawyer if it wouldn’t have been possible to allow her husband to serve as a medical orderly. “We could have arranged that but we chose not to,” the lawyer answered. Jägerstätter was executed (facing the guillotine without a blindfold) at 4 p.m. on 9 August 1943, the first of 16 executions at the Reichskriegsgericht (Reich Military Tribunal) in Berlin that day.

The road to recognition was long. For decades after the war he was a controversial figure, even in Catholic circles. Immediately after the war, Fr Josef Karobath, who knew Jägerstätter well and had accompanied his wife to Berlin to try to persuade him to change his mind for his family’s sake, wanted to publish Jägerstätter’s story in the Linz church paper, but Bishop Fliesser declined. The story would only “create confusion and disturb people’s consciences”, he said.

In the immediate post-war years, when Austria lay in ruins and people’s first instinct was to survive, Austrians were loath to talk about what they had experienced during the war and mourned their dead in silence. All their lives they had been told that obedience to church and state authorities was a foremost virtue. Jägerstätter was a provocation that they could not yet bring themselves to face. Catholic priests who had survived the concentration camps were seldom welcomed when they got back to their parishes. People felt uncomfortable in their presence.

Serious discussion of the role Austria played in the war did not begin until the late 1980s and as late as the mid-1990s opinions were still divided as to whether the Diocese of Linz should begin beatification procedures for Jägerstätter. Since then the already shrinking minority of diehards opposed to the beatification has shrunk even further. More and more prominent historical and political theologians, including Lutherans like Eberhardt Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s disciple and biographer, have discovered Jägerstätter. More of his letters have been published and detailed historical research of local events in that part of Austria during the war has become available. Moreover, all Austria’s bishops now welcome his beatification. I have asked several Catholic friends lately how they feel about Jägerstätter. Most have said, “I respect his decision but I could not have done likewise. It must have been so hard on his wife and children.” Franziska Jägerstätter, now 94, has nothing to fear. She has won through.

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September 3, 2007 / The Los Angeles Times

What The Constitution Says About Iraq

Congress and The Courts Must Recommit To The Legislative Branch’s Sole Authority To Declare War.

by Mario M. Cuomo

Most Americans want the war in Iraq ended, but it continues and Americans are killed, mutilated or wounded every day, as the Democratic majorities in Congress struggle to produce legislation
that will take our forces out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to insist that as commander in chief, he has the constitutional power to go to war and decide when to end it,
unilaterally. At the same time, another possible disaster emerges from the shadows: Bush appears to be considering a military assault on Iran, again apparently without Congress declaring war first.

How did we get to this point and what, if anything, can we do now?

The war happened because when Bush first indicated his intention to go to war against Iraq, Congress refused to insist on enforcement of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, this article has spelled out that Congress — not the president — shall have “the power to declare war.” Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II
that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a “declaration” by Congress.

Nor were the feeble, post-factum congressional resolutions of support of the Iraq invasion — in 2001 and 2002 — adequate substitutes for the formal declaration of war demanded by the founding fathers.

What can be done now?

First, Democrats should make clear that it is the president who is keeping the war in Iraq from ending. Even if Congress were able to pass a veto-proof bill with respect to withdrawal, the president would resist enforcement of the bill, insisting that as commander in chief, he is immune from Congress’ decision. That would raise a constitutional issue for the courts.

But judging by the courts’ history concerning constitutional war powers, including decisions involving the Iraq war in the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts, the judiciary would, in all probability, choose not to intervene, claiming that the disagreement between the president and Congress is a political question.

However, the political-question thesis is nowhere referred to in the Constitution, and it denies the people the protection of the Constitution in dealing with perhaps the most serious question the
nation has to face: “Should we go to war?” That position should be challenged as an abdication of constitutional duty by the courts, but the sad truth is that the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would probably support our current conservative president. As a practical matter, that means only the president can end this war or change our strategy in Iraq.

Even if it is too late for Congress to remedy its failure to comply with the Constitution with respect to Iraq, at the very least our candidates for president and our congressional leaders should assure us that they will not allow this lapse to result in further unilateral acts of war — against Iran, Pakistan or any other nation — by this president or any other. Our leaders must make it clear that in the future, Congress will insist on compliance with Article I, Section 8 for any military action that is not fairly deemed an unexpected emergency.

It is frightening that our government has permitted this fundamental and costly constitutional transgression to persist for more than four years.

We must do everything we can to end the war in Iraq and avoid a new tragedy abroad by recommitting to strict adherence to the rule of law and to the Constitution by the president, Congress and the courts — especially with respect to war powers.

Mario M. Cuomo, the governor of New York from 1983 to 1995, now practices law in New York.

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This view of Iraq from American soldiers fighting in Iraq seems to me one of the best assessments of what is happening on the ground that I have seen coming from Iraq.

New York Times / www.nytimes.com / 19 August 2007

The War As We Saw It

By Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar
Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray and Jeremy A. Murphy

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and
counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local
population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of
recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal
views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army
checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians
highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become
effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article,this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the
United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse - namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American bservers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is
not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to
make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the
three gravest mistakes we made - de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government - places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the
political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict - as we do now - will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.
In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise,
while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be
killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force
our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.

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This week’s featured article is just a quote but it is a powerful one for me.

Power In Powerlessness

“God only becomes fully comprehensible when one looks over at the Son. For example, what “almightiness” and “lordship of all” mean only becomes clear from a Christian point of view in the crib and the Cross. At this point simultaneously a new concept of power and a new concept of lordship and dominion are born. The highest power is demonstrated as the calm willingness to completely renounce all power: and we are shown that it is powerful, not through force, but only through the freedom of love which, even when it is rejected, is stronger than the exalted powers of earthly violence.”

— Pope Benedict XVI
“Introduction to Christianity”

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On July 4, Put Away the Flags

By Howard Zinn, Progressive Media Project
Posted on July 4, 2007, Printed on July 4, 2007
http://www.alternet .org/story/ 55822/
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours — huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction — what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our “Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: “We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.”

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, “to civilize and Christianize” the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for “liberty,” for “democracy”?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best- selling “A People’s History of the United States” (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project.

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The War Inside

Troops Are Returning From the Battlefield With Psychological Wounds, But the Mental-Health System That Serves Them Makes Healing Difficult
By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 17, 2007; Page A01

Army Spec. Jeans Cruz helped capture Saddam Hussein. When he came home to the Bronx, important people called him a war hero and promised to help him start a new life. The mayor of New York, officials of his parents’ home town in Puerto Rico, the borough president and other local dignitaries honored him with plaques and silk parade sashes. They handed him their business cards and urged him to phone.

But a “black shadow” had followed Cruz home from Iraq, he confided to an Army counselor. He was hounded by recurring images of how war really was for him: not the triumphant scene of Hussein in handcuffs, but visions of dead Iraqi children.

.
.
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Once celebrated by his government, Cruz feels defeated by its bureaucracy. He no longer has the stamina to appeal the VA decision, or to make the Army correct the sloppy errors in his medical records or amend his personnel file so it actually lists his combat awards.

Read the rest of the article in the Washington Post

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For the second week in a row my featured article of the week comes from the Sunday Milwaukee Journal Crossroads section of the newspaper. This time it is an article from a local citizen of a rural area near Milwaukee who clearly explains our American society’s addiction to violence and its consequences.

Jasmine’s death was collateral damage in a culture of violence

By DANIEL GREGO
Posted: June 9, 2007 in the Crossroads Section of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=616955

Last month, the Journal Sentinel published a series of articles by reporter Sarah Carr examining the growing problem of violence in schools, particularly those in Milwaukee.

When I read them, I found myself thinking: “Why would anyone be surprised that young people are violent?” Children imitate the behavior they see modeled for them by adults, and we, as a society, are addicted to violence.

We surround our children with it. We worship it and glorify it. And whether we call its perpetrators “heroes” or “thugs,” we sensationalize it.

The media are saturated with violence: violent movies and television programs, violent video games, song lyrics promoting violence.

The news media emphasize violence. (If it bleeds, it leads.) In order to satisfy our addiction, we continue to rationalize and justify our use of violence.

And we have foolishly refused to consider abandoning the tools that amplify our violence: our guns and missiles and bombs.

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed an audience of 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City. That day, King confessed: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes about most meaningfully through non-violent action.

“But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

If we substitute “handguns and Uzis” for “Molotov cocktails and rifles” and “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” wouldn’t King’s words apply today? Aren’t our young people just learning what we are teaching them?

The week after I read the newspaper articles, Jasmine Owens, who was only 4 years old, was killed by a stray bullet while she was jumping rope in front of her home.

Like everyone else, I mourned the loss of this innocent child. Her death was a heartbreaking example of our addictive pattern.

When we “liberated” Iraq, thousands of innocent children were killed. The military calls their deaths “collateral damage.”
The young man who pulled the trigger that ended Jasmine’s life wasn’t aiming at her. He thought he was justified in firing at a rival or an enemy.

Jasmine’s death was collateral damage. I worry that our continued addiction to violence is producing the additional collateral damage of the desensitization of our hearts and the deadening of our souls.
We have to find a way to stop the violence, all of it, from the violence perpetrated by gangs on the streets of Milwaukee to the violence bought and paid for by our tax dollars and administered by those in power in the halls of Washington, D.C.

The first step to overcoming any addiction is to acknowledge that we are addicted. Let’s face it - we can’t even enjoy watching a hockey game unless a fight breaks out.

Just as important, we need to recognize that many people are profiting from our addiction. The military/industrial complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us, has been rolling along unchecked for decades now.

With so much of our economy devoted to war and the preparation for war, is it any wonder that our so-called leaders feel the need to hold “military inventory sales” from time to time? How else would you explain our involvement in one military exercise after another, each one justified by ever more egregious lies?

There will be no single or easy way to overcome our addiction to violence. We would certainly benefit from a re-examination of the ideas of King and those of Mahatma Gandhi, from whom King learned so much.

It wouldn’t hurt to reread the Sermon on the Mount every once in a while and to try to take it seriously.
At the very least, we should begin teaching our children that violence only begets violence and that we will never solve our problems by resorting to it.

Gandhi once pointed out: “An eye for eye will make the whole world blind.”

We cannot bring Jasmine or any of the other innocent victims of our addiction to violence back to life.
But in her memory, let’s put an end to collateral damage by doing all we can to stop inflicting damage in the first place.

Daniel Grego lives in Ixonia

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This article comes to you from the editorial pages of Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A soldier son serves and dies. Did his father fail him?

By ANDREW J. BACEVICH

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=613587 Posted: June 2, 2007

Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss.

When my son was killed in Iraq last month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question.

Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my anti-war writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But, in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops.

Although the First Amendment protects anti-war critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops - today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen. As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy.

I know that even now, people of goodwill find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day.

They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won.

Some - the members of the the-surge-is-already-working school of thought - even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much.

“The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in an August 2005 opinion piece in The Washington Post. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Here was my own version of duty.

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others - teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks - to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament.

But half a year later, the war continues with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party.
After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass

My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of Bush and Karl Rove - namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.
Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.
Memorial Day orators said that a GI’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching for them.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-‘45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.”

It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech into little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.
In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps. Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam.

As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier - brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought that I was doing the same.

In fact, while was he was giving all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His son, 1st Lt. Andrew John Bacevich, died May 13 after a suicide bomb explosion in Salah al-Din province. This article first appeared in The Washington Post.

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Remembering Our Returning Soldiers with Mental Health Illnesses

The feature article this week comes from the National Catholic Report and is about the large number of soldiers returning home from the Iraq war with mental health illnesses and how they are neglected. Recently we have heard from the ABC anchor who received brain injuries in Iraq of how many of these soldiers are neglected once they are sent home. Persons with mental illnesses, which are even more hidden physically, are also being neglected. This is the story about one soldier, Eugene Cherry, who instead of receiving treatment is now facing court martial due to his mental illness developed in the war.

Issue Date: May 25, 2007

Returning soldiers’ mental health neglected
By EMILIANO HUET-VAUGHN
Fort Drum, N.Y.

Eugene Cherry’s life hasn’t been the same since he deployed to Iraq in 2004. Now back home, Cherry said he still hasn’t recovered from his wartime experience.

“There’s many times I’ve drunk myself to sleep because I can’t fall asleep, and the meds they gave me didn’t help,” said Cherry.

Working in Iraq as a medic routinely assigned to deal with the aftermath of suicide bombings, kidnappings and roadside bombs, Cherry was witness to some of the most gruesome scenes of war.

“I had recovery missions where I’d go out to a site where guys got burnt so bad you could still smell their flesh — still charred, still burning and smoking when you get there,” he said. “You’d get out and be stepping on somebody’s private parts or you got an arm over here. … It was a regular occurrence.”

Such experiences left Cherry to this day with characteristic symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder — anxiety, depression, irritability, feelings of isolation, intrusive memories of traumatic moments in war, and difficulty sleeping.

“It takes me at least a couple hours to go to sleep, and then when I do go to sleep I [sleep] maybe about an hour, maybe two hours at the most, and then I wake back up for the rest of the night. It’s been like this over two years,” recounted Cherry. He said he thinks about what he witnessed in Iraq constantly, with graphic war memories triggered by news reports or even the sight of fellow soldiers’ uniforms, which now make him “sick to the stomach” to see.

But instead of receiving Army mental health counseling for these symptoms when he returned to Fort Drum, N.Y., from Iraq in June 2005, Cherry said he found the military unresponsive to his mental health care needs.

“The whole mental health system in the Army, and I would say especially here on Fort Drum, is a bunch of trash,” he said. “It doesn’t really address your real issues. The only thing they do is just load you up on medication and hope the problem goes away. … The entire system’s designed for the Army, not for the well being of the soldier.”

Now, nearly two years later, Cherry is being court-martialed and faces up to a year in prison for being absent without leave when he returned to his mother’s home in Chicago to find treatment.

“Eugene’s AWOL is related to the fact that he wasn’t getting care on the base,” said Tod Ensign of Citizen Soldier, a national GI rights group providing legal advice to Cherry. “But this is treated by the military as irrelevant and all they seem to concern themselves with is treating Eugene as a criminal and focusing on his so-called criminal acts.” Ensign said the punitive rather than medical approach towards Cherry is being pursued to discourage other soldiers from desertion at a time when military manpower is already being pushed to its limits with stop loss orders and extensions.

“Eugene needs treatment, not incarceration,” said Hannah Frisch, a clinical psychologist of 37 years with specialization in posttraumatic stress disorder. Frisch saw Cherry after he left Fort Drum on unauthorized leave in the fall of 2005. In papers Frisch presented to commanders at Fort Drum on May 14, two weeks after his court-martial was announced, she explained that based on clinical sessions with Cherry from April to August 2006, it was her professional opinion that he was suffering from posttraumatic stress and depression caused by his war experiences and that he was in need of counseling.

Cherry is not alone. A Pentagon survey released in May found that one-third of soldiers and Marines in high levels of combat in Iraq report depression, generalized anxiety or posttraumatic stress.

These returning soldiers’ needs are going unmet by underfunded and understaffed mental health care departments within both the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs health care systems, other government and media reports indicate.

In documents released in April to USA Today by the VA, 114 of 209 Vet Centers, sites designed to make it easier for combat vets to receive health care assistance, reported that they need at least one extra psychologist or therapist to handle the volume of returning soldiers in need of psychological care. This follows a report from the Government Accountability Office last year showing that only 1 percent of servicemen and women returning from Iraq get referred for mental health evaluations for posttraumatic stress disorder by the military, despite symptoms being present among 13 percent of returning service personnel, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study. Many of those returning reported an interest in receiving help.

In Cherry’s case, counseling proved to be elusive upon return from Iraq as a result of a combination of restrictive base regulations and Fort Drum’s understaffed mental health care team, tasked with care for returning soldiers from one of the most deployed combat divisions in the country.

By his own account, Cherry sought mental health counseling on base after returning to Fort Drum in June 2005, but he was not given an appointment until August. Cherry and other soldiers interviewed characterized the “overloaded” mental health counseling staff as having little time to devote to soldiers’ mental health needs in cases where suicide and homicide are not a risk. Cherry’s August appointment was rescheduled because the battalion commander issued a prohibition on appointments made during physical training time, which caused Cherry’s first appointment to be pushed back to mid-September.

Feeling neglected and “totally tired of the system,” and with his posttraumatic stress and depression symptoms worsening, Cherry decided to return to his family in Chicago, where he eventually obtained counseling with Frisch, following a referral from an area Vietnam veteran, he said.

Cherry’s case is under congressional investigation initiated by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Not until superiors at Drum became aware of the investigation did they offer Cherry any mental health services following his voluntary return to Fort Drum this February, Cherry said, even though his symptoms have persisted. The treatment has primarily consisted of antidepressant and sleep medication, which Cherry said has done nothing for him.

“It is possible that medication might be helpful as an adjunct, but a person in Eugene’s situation really needs really intensive psychotherapy,” recommended Frisch.

Representatives from Fort Drum were unable to comment in time for the publication of this story, though in interviews, other soldiers on the base agreed with the characterization of the mental health care department as understaffed and overloaded.

That Fort Drum’s mental health care system is overtaxed is common knowledge among local civilian mental health specialists, according to Holly Armstrong, a human services professor who works at the SUNY campus outside Fort Drum and with the North Country Council of Social Agencies, which serves the mental health needs of an area heavily populated with military families and veterans. “They have very good personnel [at Fort Drum] but there are just too many people that need [care],” Armstrong said.

“That overdraft comes in the community,” she said. This has exhausted civilian mental health resources in the area as well, she said, forcing returning soldiers wanting care to take 70-mile trips to Syracuse, N.Y., to seek help.

Armstrong said she is worried about what will happen this summer when more than 6,000 soldiers from two combat brigades return to Fort Drum.

“There aren’t enough [mental health care resources] in the military and there aren’t enough in the non-military,” she warned.

But there are, apparently, enough resources to prosecute Cherry. After two months of uncertainty about his status following his return from the year-plus absence, Cherry learned at the end of April that the Army was initiating court-martial proceedings against him for going AWOL.

If he is found guilty, Cherry may get prison time as well as a bad conduct discharge that will make him ineligible to receive most medical services for veterans.

miliano Huet-Vaughn is a Kansas City, Kan., freelance writer.

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Guns and American values — Editorial from The Tablet (London) / 21 April 2007

Right after the shootings at Virginia Tech, editorials appeared all over the world about the terrible gun violence that we experience in America. This editorial from London’s The Tablet for April 21, 2007 points out how in America the values of individualism overshadow the values of the common good, as compared with most other countries.

Locally, we have a chance to make a statement about the common good taking precedence over individualism. There is public hearing scheduled for May 29th, 2007 that would close the loophole in the present gun laws that forbid a ‘private citizen’ from selling a gun without a background check. See Mothers Against Gun Violence for more details on The Responsible Gun Ownership bill and the hearing.

Guns and American values — Editorial
The Tablet (London) / 21 April 2007

It is almost too easy to hold American gun law responsible for American gun crime. The ready availability of firearms is undoubtedly one of the reasons why a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed more than 30 university members - fellow students and academic staff - before turning his weapon on himself. But it also has to be noted that the pro-gun lobby is saying that if more students carried guns, he could have been stopped sooner. Indeed, self-protection is the most common reason why Americans buy guns in the first place.

Those who seek tighter control of guns, and not just in Virginia, which is notoriously lax in these matters, are asserting that certain liberties of the citizen have to be curtailed by Government for the sake of the common good. In contrast, the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” arose from the perception that British colonial power had become a threat to individual freedom, which only an armed citizenry could effectively hold at bay. Thus the debate about gun control touches something very deep in the American psyche. It is a generalisation, but one bearing much truth, that Americans have never trusted their own government, whether colonial, federal or state, and they do not trust each other.

The national frame of values encourages an individualism, even atomisation, within American society that may relate to the Puritan origins of the first colonial settlements. Some American commentators speak of a streak of paranoia in the national personality, and a tendency to suspect conspiracies in high places. Guns are no less prevalent in the hands of ordinary people in peace-loving Canada and law-abiding Switzerland, but gun crime is low in both places. But neither the Swiss nor the Canadians have a national culture that emphasises the sense of individual competitiveness, of “each against the whole”, that characterises America, nor a film industry that glamorises gun violence.

Although this competitiveness may be the source of American economic success, it clearly has its negative side. The feeling that one’s monetary worth reflects one’s merit explains the relatively low emphasis in American politics on welfare and policies for overcoming poverty. Compassion dictates that no one should starve, but most of the people who find themselves in a hole are expected to dig their own way out of it.

In other countries, a feeling for the common good gives a government an unchallenged right to regulate gun ownership even to the point of prohibiting it in principle, as in the United Kingdom. That implies a degree of trust among citizens themselves, and between citizens and the state, that America manifestly lacks. So gun control is not about to become an American election winner, even if ghastly campus mass killings like that at Virginia Tech were to happen again.

In the very long term what could change these basic American cultural values would be a shift from a mainly Protestant individualistic to a more Catholic communitarian understanding of the relationship between the state and the individual. The Catholic population is predicted to go on growing, largely through Spanish-speaking immigration, to the point where it could even become a majority in half a century. So such a cultural shift is not inconceivable. But until now American Catholics have seemed keener to embrace American values than to criticise them. Where gun control is concerned, a strong assertion of the primacy of the common good is overdue.

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About Perception and Parity

by Patricia Obletz
Introduced on the Milwaukee Renaissance HomePage, and found in its entirety on Patricia’s mini-website here at Patricia Obletz -> Mental Health Parity Bill, this article explains why mental illnesses should receive parity in health care and health insurance with physical illnesses, and offers some suggestions for why it doesn’t and what we can do about it.

The article includes several facts that many of us may find surprising or eye-opening. Patricia urges us to recognize that mental illnesses can affect all of our families — we all have a stake in seeing the inequality of access to treatment addressed.

The full article can be found on the Milwaukee Renaissance at:

Patricia Obletz -> Mental Health Parity Bill