Could the largest oil drilling catastrophe ever also end up the largest natural gas and climate disaster in recent history? Methane gas, we now know, caused the catastrophic explosion and ceaseless gush of oil in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, resulting immediately in 11 human deaths, and untold natural and economic loss. In part from earlier tragedies, methane’s properties have been understood for decades. Yet neither BP nor government agencies paid much attention to the simple facts about the nature of natural gas.

• Where there’s coal and oil, there’s methane, a sister carbon product of the same organic material degraded over vast stretches of time.
• Methane in the air and upper levels of the ocean is a gas; but at the bottom of the sea, increased pressure makes methane a solid. In these depths methane is trapped in water in a slushy crystal called methane hydrate.
• In this crystal form, methane is lighter than water and when dislodged from natural sediments, which lock it in, it will rise. As it ascends, pressure decreases, and the methane expands, changing to gas.
• As the methane gas expands, a small bubble becomes a large explosive bubble, becoming a highly flammable and explosive plume when it reaches the air.

On April 20th, in the Gulf of Mexico, methane behaved as would be expected: dislodged from the bottom of the sea, methane crystals found their way into the well, rose up the drill column, expanded more and more, bursting though seals and barriers, until they kicked into the atmosphere, and exploded in flame from a nearby spark.

Dr. Robert Bea, Director of UC Berkeley’s Catastrophic Risk Management Center, reported to AP that leaked BP documents reveal that dislodged methane hydrate, which had contaminated recently poured cement ,was the culprit in the Gulf disaster. There are tests to detect leaky cement, but there is no record of Halliburton, the cement contractor, using them. Deepwater Horizon workers told Bea that blasts of natural gas had troubled the rig in the weeks and days before the explosion, one so forceful that operations were shut down to avoid igniting the fumes.

At last Wednesday’s congressional hearings, Rep Henry Waxman reported that on the day of the explosion, the rig failed a critical pressure test, indicating high gas levels in the well bore. Nonetheless, eager to move to lucrative production and move off of the expensive ($500,000 a day) rental rig, two hours before the explosion BP removed heavy mud (expensive, reusable drilling fluid) from the well and replaced it with sea water, creating the perfect low-pressure environment for the methane hydrate pockets in the cement to turn from solid to gas, and shoot up.

In its repair efforts BP has remained inattentive to deepwater drilling’s natural nemesis — methane hydrate. The 4-storey container lowered to the ocean floor to trap the gushing oil quickly clogged with the icy compound. At the very spot where methane crystals started their ascent only a week before, from a seabed known to contain a good portion of the world’s methane hydrates, how could they have expected otherwise? ABC reported last week that natural gas flowing from the broken well is slowing the gush of oil, a sign to them that the spill crisis might be abating. But as the gas moves, it is only time before some if it evaporates into the air as methane or the carbon dioxide that methane readily oxidizes into.

According to geologist Gerald Dickens, frozen methane hydrate welling up from the ocean floor resulted in the mass extinction of the Late Paleocene period some 55 million years ago — and similar claims have been made for what geologists call the Great Dying, the mass extinction of most life 200 million years before that, at the end of the Permian period. Climatologist Dr. Drew Shindell, of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently demonstrated through computer modeling that methane when mixed with air is, molecule for molecule, the most powerful greenhouse house gas, 26 times more potent than CO2.

What are the environmental repercussions of natural gas unnaturally dislodged in the Gulf last month? Dislocation of the methane crystals abundant in the deep ocean could cause disasters such as tsunamis on “a scale inconceivable…outside of a Hollywood special-effects blockbuster,” according to UK climatologist Hadrian Jeffs, a chilling note on recent tsunamis and earthquakes in much drilled seas. Could the methane erupting today in the Gulf provoke additional single and sequential disasters? How much could it hasten the “runaway global greenhouse effect” that hovers as the planet warms? Could the largest oil drilling catastrophe ever also end up the largest natural gas and climate disaster in recent history?

The Department of Energy has been supporting methane hydrate R&D for a decade, and in Canada and Japan exploratory drilling for methane is already under way. Since the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster, energy blogs (like greeningofoil.com!) are abuzz with methane hydrate talk, not to lament or warn but to champion a bold advance on this new frontier of the allegedly greener fossil fuel of natural gas. an As the clean claims for deep shale drilling for natural gas are proving untrue with mounting incidents of fracking-related air and water contamination, illness, explosions, and even earthquakes, the latest “alternative” carbon is poised to pounce.

As the Gulf floor still spews oil and gas, the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act proposes continued offshore drilling and aggressively advances natural gas production as well as R&D to “level the playing field” for the “cleanest fossil fuel.” Every hour our leaders spend promoting and protecting the oil and gas industry, the environment degrades still more. That solutions to Earth’s energy and environmental crises lie in sun, wind, and tide should be as clear as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico once were.

Nora Eisenberg is the director of the City University of New York’s fellowship program for emerging scholars. Her short stories, essays and reviews have appeared in such places as The Partisan Review, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times and Tikkun. She is the author of three highly acclaimed novels. Her most recent novel, When You Come Home (Curbstone, 2009), explores the the 1991 Gulf War and Gulf War illness.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146926/

Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC documentary, The McVeigh Tapes: The Confessions of an American Terrorist, which was broadcast multiple times last week to mark the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, offered not only an historic investigation but a cautionary tale. Militias and right-wing extremist groups are on the rise, both the Department of Homeland Security and the Southern Poverty Law Center report, and each week the discourse and decorum of professional hate-mongers at the right wing of media, government, and advocacy organizations reach new lows. The documentary, a level-headed examination of both the perpetrator and the victims of the largest act of terrorism ever inflicted by an American citizen on American citizens, could not be more timely, coming only weeks after the arrest of a Michigan-based militia group allegedly plotting against government agents and coinciding with much publicized march on Washington by gun rights groups. “We ignore this, our own very recent history of anti-government violence and the dangers of domestic terrorism, at our peril,” Maddow warned in an ad for her show. But there’s another equally important lesson to be learned from the McVeigh story: we ignore our government’s recent history of violence, both abroad and at home, at the greatest peril.

Before the Wars

Much has been made of McVeigh’s early involvement in guns, which his grandfather Ed McVeigh launched when Tim was 14, with the gift of a .22 caliber rifle. Pendleton, NY, McVeigh’s rural hometown outside Buffalo, was a community that hunted for food, a more moral and humane practice than buying industrially raised and slaughtered meat, McVeigh would later argue in a letter to a local paper. And much has been made of McVeigh’s early interest in survivalism, another practice founded in a harsh upstate realities. When McVeigh was nine, a blizzard crippled Buffalo; cars got buried and people froze to death. Like many other families, the McVeighs ran out of basic supplies, which led to the family practice of stockpiling water and food. The Buffalo in which Timothy McVeigh came of age was suffering brutal economic conditions as well. Banks and factories closed or contracted, collapsing local businesses and real estate. The large radiator plant that had provided two generations of McVeighs (UAW members and Democrats) with secure, if wearying, work stopped hiring. After high school and an uninspiring year at a local technical college, McVeigh moved in and out of dead-end jobs, filling his time with his hobbies of guns, computers, and survivalism, but his frustration mounted. He wanted work and a life, and soon McVeigh made the choice than many young people with limited means and prospects made in the late eighties: he joined the military.

The Army

By all accounts, McVeigh found himself in the Army, which he joined in May 1988, a month after his 20th birthday. As a soldier, his teenage interest in machinery and guns could flourish and his early survivalism could morph into a disciplined military lifestyle. To a fellow soldier interviewed by journalists Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck for their book, American Terrorist — Maddow’s documentary, in which they both appear, is based on their tapes — McVeigh was “the epitome of infantry.” But the histrionic rituals of violence and killing turned him off, McVeigh told Michel and Herbeck: “Twenty times a day, it would be, ‘Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!’ You would be screaming that until your throat was raw. … If somebody put a video camera on that, they would think it was a bunch of sickos.” Disciplined, talented, and highly intelligent, McVeigh finished basic training with the highest grades and an unmatched score of 1,000 out of 1,000 points in marksmanship. To his delight, the Army invited him to apply for the Special Forces, a perfect match for his interest and skills, but before he could try out he was shipped to the Gulf, to wait for the looming war.

Desert Storm

His first day in the 100-hour ground war, following orders, McVeigh shot an Iraqi soldier manning a machine gun over a mile away, Michel and Herbeck report. The sight of red mist replacing the soldier’s head in his viewfinder disturbed McVeigh, and he discharged the rest of his round in the sand. Ten years later in his famous 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradely, he would recall his thoughts at the time: “What right did I have to come over to his country and kill him? … How did he ever transgress against me?” Later, on the highway from Kuwait to Iraq (come to be known as the “Highway of Death” for the thousands that U.S. Forces corralled and massacred on the road, the night of Feb 26, 1991), he was ordered to kill surrendering Iraqi soldiers, which we don’t know if he did or not, though we know he was deeply affected. He told Bradley he had gone to the Gulf thinking, “Saddam is evil, all Iraqis are evil.” But now it was “an entirely different ballgame … face to face … you realize they`re just people like you.” Later, McVeigh would say that the US.’s continued campaign against Iraq in embargoes and bombings was hypocritical, since the U.S. led the world in “stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction.”

The much decorated soldier (he won a Bronze Star and the Combat Infantry Badge) returned to Fort Riley trying to pick up where he had left off, preparing for the Green Berets. But most of the infantry’s time in the desert was spent waiting for war, with little activity and training, and McVeigh like most came back out of shape physically and emotionally. The Special Forces allows each invitee a single try-out, and after two days, his feet blistered and his back aching, McVeigh was out, his dreams up in smoke. At the end of 1991, defeated and demoralized, he left the U.S. Army. But, in his mind, he remained a soldier.

Post-War and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Timothy McVeigh came back from the Gulf “broken,” his aunt would later tell the New York Times. “He said it was terrible there. He was on the front line and had seen death and caused death.” The happy and joking kid that had joined up was now a depressed young man, his father reported to Michel and Herbeck. He began to gamble compulsively, covering his debts for the losing Buffalo Bills with credit card loans, which he maxed out and couldn’t pay back. Even if had been able to find a decent job, it’s doubtful he could have held onto it. He told Michel and Herbeck that he suffered a “nervous breakdown” and “PTSD.” His behavior became strange: In the middle of a freezing upstate New York winter, he traveled around wearing only sweatpants, his grandfather would report. He spent hours writing angry letters to the local Lockport Union Sun & Journal: “The ‘American Dream’ of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling to just buy next week’s groceries. Heaven forbid the car breaks down.” In a later letter to the editor, he wrote, “At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people, democracy seems heading down the same road. No one is seeing the ‘big picture’ … America is in decline. … Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live longer?” His angry letters were not limited to newspapers. When the government wrote demanding over a thousand dollars in alleged military overpay, he wrote them back saying, “Go ahead, take everything I own; take my dignity. Feel good as you grow fat and rich at my expense; sucking my tax dollars and property.”

And then in August 1992 the government’s attack of a survivalist family in northern Idaho, which left a mother, her teenage son, and the family dog dead, further shook McVeigh. It would take years for government reviews, from congressional hearings to federal trials, to confirm what McVeigh immediately suspected about the siege of Randy Weaver’s cabin in Ruby Ridge: the government had concocted a case against the eccentric but harmless Weaver, which ended in murders and and a cover-up. Soon after the massacre, McVeigh sold everything that would not fit in his car and took to the road, searching, he told his sister, for a “free state” in which to live.

Another Massacre and Another War

For the next year, Timothy McVeigh lived in and out of his car, crossing the country several times. Consumed by the vision of the government invading citizens’ homes and confiscating their weapons, he began visiting gun shows and hanging out with Army buddies Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, both guns enthusiasts. A few months after the Ruby Ridge debacle, federal agents engaged in a standoff at a Christian cult compound in Waco, Texas where women and children were allegedly being abused by cult leader, David Koresh. When after a 51 day stand-off, the government stormed the buildings with gas and guns, then burned and bulldozed what remained, leaving some 80 men, women, and children dead, McVeigh watched the event on television and “weeped,” he told Michel and Herbeck, and then was consumed by rage. For the next two years, he planned and prepared for his counter-attack, gathering supplies, building his bombs, and selecting his battle site. On April 19, 1995, exactly two years after Branch Davidian massacre, McVeigh executed his plan. Detonating a bomb in a rental truck he’d parked outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, he killed 168 dead men, women, and children dead and injured 500,

Fifteen years after the Oklahoma City bombing, Americans are still astonished that McVeigh never said he was sorry, a sign, according to many commentators, survivors, and victims’ families that the bomber was an inhuman sociopath, cold-bloodedly cruel and indifferent to suffering. The taped voice in the Maddow documentary is matter-of-fact and flat, rarely rising or falling, even when it boast or laments. Dr. Paul Heath, who worked as a counselor in the VA office in the Murrah Building at the time of the bombing, met McVeigh the day before the bombing when he appeared at the office, pretending to be looking for a job; Heath recently told Newseek that McVeigh seemed “delusional,” and that he suspected he had PTSD. McVeigh insists in the tapes that he was a soldier from beginning to end, approaching and leaving the scene of battle in total control. In the tapes he speaks of his PTSD and breakdown in the year after his return from the Gulf. When exactly did his conditions abate, rendering him in total control? When he decided to live in his car? When he drove around the country from gun show to gun show? When he traveled to Ruby Ridge to inspect bullet-holes, or camped outside Waco during the stand-off? In cars and trucks, driving or walking, jogging or running, McVeigh carried with him a war-wrecked mind, a dark, narrow trench surrounded by violence, unable to imagine any future for itself — or others — besides death.

According to Dr. William E. Baumzweiger, a California psychiatrist with expertise in psychiatric ailments of Gulf War veterans, “a small but significant number of Gulf War veterans become homicidal” seemingly “out of nowhere.” The brain scans of veterans with Gulf War illness are distinctly abnormal, according to Dr. Robert Haley, the University of Texas epidimiologist and preeminent researcher of Gulf War Illness. John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway sniper also went to the Gulf War “happy,” “focused, and “intelligent, “returning home “depressed,” “totally confused,” and “violent,” to a recently published memoir by his second wife, Mildred Allen. Muhammad’s appeals lawyers stressed that his “severe mental illness” never came up at trial, where he was allowed to represent himself despite obvious mental incompetence. (He maintained his innocence until the end, claiming that at the time of the killing spree he was in Germany for dental work.) In seeking clemency and a stay of execution, Muhammad’s lawyers presented psychiatric reports diagnosing Schizophrenia and brain scans documenting profound malformations consistent with psychotic disease. Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor Virginia Governor Tim Kaine were impressed. According to Governor Kaine, “crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand.”

We have no images of Timothy McVeigh’s brain. We don’t know what toxic damage it may have suffered from pills, injections, sprays, and gaseous plumes, or from the bombs and fires on the highway at the end of the war. Psychological trauma alone, neeruoscientist now tell us, affects not only psyches but brains. Sophisticated neuroimaging shows the brains of those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to be abnormal in areas regulating memory retrieval and inhibition (hippocampus), fearfulness and focus (pre-frontal cortex), and emotionality and lability (amygdala). The hippocampus of Alzheimer’s sufferers are also shrunken and the amygdala of bi-polar sufferers have enhanced activation similar to those with PTSD.

Whether from toxins or trauma or both, the sunny, joking Tim McVeigh that family and neighbors knew and loved never made it home. And a depressed and shaken 23-year-old returned to a town too broke and shaken itself to provide support or relief. When he took off, the closest thing to home McVeigh found was the dead-end family farm of his Army buddy Terry Nichols in the wastelands of rural Michigan. It was here that McVeigh planned his “counter-attack” on the government, for the war, Ruby Ridge, and for the “final straw” of Waco.

Michigan, the state with the highest unemployment both then and now is, not surprisingly, the state with the most militias, with family farms forced to borrow in order to compete continuing to collapse in foreclosure; with manufacturing moved abroad and auto and steel plants closing; with white supremacy and violence hawked as final solutions. Today hucksters Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, et al have joined the old regulars like Rush Limbaugh and David Savage at the booth, selling locals shots at targets with the promise of winning something for themselves. The professional haters make their fortunes praying on the fears of hard-up families, jobless youth, homeless veterans, and struggling seniors, warning against the government elites intent on stealing their health care, jobs, guns, food, and infants, and handing them over to immigrants, blacks, and stem-cell toting killers.

The last few months have been particularly frightening, as anti-government extremists spit on black congressmen, break windows and cut gas lines at healthcare-reformers’ offices, hang the president in effigy yet again. Ignorance and fear are the best soil for growing hate and extremism. On the right, enemies of healthcare reform are often ignorant of the fact that their own healthcare is government supported. Americans blaming African-Americans and immigrants for taking their jobs are ignorant of the higher unemployment and poverty minorities suffer. On the left, enemies of guns too often ignore the importance of hunting to rural families, both culturally and financially. Big finance is entwined equally with the Democratic and Republican parties, and the social liberalism boasted by Wall Street firms never interferes with their plunder of the people and the planet. “Right-wing” Ron Paul is among the most consistently anti-war and anti-corporate voices. The Christian anti-government right has its match of religious fanatics in high offices here and among our closest allies of all persuasions. The “bible” that Timothy McVeigh discovered in prison was Unintended Consequences by John Ross, a 1996 gun-rights novel interlaced with real figures and events. Among the examples of vicious state violence against citizens that Ross offers are not only the expected “right-wing” cause celebres like Ruby Ridge and Waco, but exempla of the liberal and even far left — the 1932 Bonus Army March, the 1945 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the 1985 Philadelphia police massacre of the black survivalist MOVE group.

Timothy McVeigh said nothing at his trial until just before sentencing, when he quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.”

Brandeis’s other words in the same paragraph of his famous Olmstead dissent are worth repeating today:

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy and…terrible retribution.

There is no bringing back the innocent victims of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, or the victims of Waco two years before, or the Iraqi civilians or surrendering soldiers slaughtered in Desert Storm, or the hundreds of thousands Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed this past decade. Non-violence may be the most powerful modern weapon developed to date, both practically and morally, but old ways die hard. One crime may never justify another, but it can surely provoke, a miserable fact that we fail to acknowledge at the peril of any lasting peace, at home or abroad.

As women across the globe remembered the 500 victims of serial sex murder in Juarez, Mexico, the city’s prison authorities used female prisoners to pander to male fantasies.

If last week’s celebration of International Women’s Day was any indication, the 99 year-old holiday is going stronger than ever.

In New York City, UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that world peace is not possible without women’s full and equal participation in every social arena. Meanwhile, around the globe, symposia and conferences, performances and exhibitionss, rallies and marches and more celebrated women’s contributions, acknowledged victories, defeats, and remaining fronts in their struggle against worldwide inequality, injustice, poverty, and violence.

Rarely in recent history has there been any focused attention on the continuing victimization of women in Ciudad Juarez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, where, since 1993, more than 500 women have been kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and murdered with impunity. Yet on International Women’s Day, women artists in Los Angeles and Chicago mounted exhibitions to chronicle the ongoing femicide and commemorate its victims. In Sydney, Australia, women marched through the city to honor the women of Juarez.

But perhaps the most publicized event for this year’s International Women’s Day, in Juarez itself, was a march of a very different kind.

Belleza Cautiva (Captive Beauty) commemorated no one. A beauty pageant, it was planned, overseen, and judged by the authorities of Juarez’s Cereso Prison, who selected 15 out of the 600 inmates of the over-crowded facility to compete for the crown, title, and some cash. A February story produced by Mexico City’s large Millenia TV network showed the young women practicing for the big day: Wearing skin-tight jeans and T-shirts, they strike poses, produce provocative pouts, and wrap their bodies around poles, looking drained and scared, as if someone out of view holds a gun. The prison director, in a close-up, explains that these are not bad women, just women who made a bad mistake.

The real mistake was living in Ciudad Juarez, where drug trafficking, the crime for which most all of the women inmates have been convicted, is one of the few available jobs besides prostitution. The jobs at the maquiladoros, mostly U.S.-owned plants assembling clothes and electronics for U.S. consumers, are both dangerous — the bodies of women continue to show up in fields and garbage dumps — and dwindling. As the economy slows, corporations are moving on to other countries, where they can pay even lower wages than the prevailing $2 and change paid to women in Juarez. Time Magazine recently reported a 40 percent reduction in cargo trucked across the U.S. border in the past year, and the El Paso Times has reported that, in the last two years, some 11,000 Juarez businesses have closed and 116,000 houses — a quarter of the city’s housing — have been abandoned.

In a country where prostitution is legal, 10- and 20-year sentences are not uncommon for women convicted of carrying drugs. The director of the Cereso Prison, Gerardo Ortiz Arellano, declared the goal of project Belleza Cautiva to be “Recapturing Women’s Self-Esteem.” But it’s hard to see how strutting down a catwalk for the judgment of prison officials could do anything for the contestants (or the hundreds of other women prisoners lined up to watch). Millenia’s coverage of the event revealed few proud smiles, but rather a line-up of sad women, forcing viewers to wonder whether the real goal of the pageant had more to do with recapturing the esteem and reputation of the prison administration, the prison, and the city. (Last March, the Juarez prison was the site of a riotous battle between two rival gangs, which left 20 dead. Director Ortiz Arellano, who some commentators refer to as “el Monstruo,” was appointed last year while still under investigation for possible involvement in an assassination at the Chihuahua prison he’d directed.)

The winner of the Miss Captive Beauty crown was a 22-year-old named Cecilia Flores — no likely relation to Maria Sagrario Gonzalez Flores, one of the earliest and most publicized victims of the Juarez femicide; but the pageant of Captive Beauties is not unrelated to dead young women. The cynical stunt didn’t kill or dismember any women but it disremembered the murdered girls of Juarez and displaced the cruel and stark reality of young women’s lives with the fantasies of men of position and power.

Both former President Vincente Fox and current President Felipe Calderon have claimed that the femicide in Juarez has been overblown. But it doesn’t matter what they think any more. In December, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a long-awaited decision in a case brought against the Mexican government on behalf the family of three young women, whose tortured bodies were among eight found in a field near the Juarez maquiladoras in 2001. In addition to sanctioning Mexico for failure to investigate the systematic crimes against the women based on their class, gender, and age (two were minors), the Court ruling requires the Mexican government to publish the ruling in official records, publicly acknowledge responsibility (including responsibility for failing to protect the girls), build a memorial to the victims, properly investigate the slayings, and prosecute the culprits.

The Mexican government said it will comply — it has to, since the rulings of the Court, a judicial unit of the Organization of the American States, are binding — and the memorial is already under way. In a country ravaged by drug cartels, political corruption, and state and criminal violence, however, the government’s agreement to recognize, publicize, and redress its role in the murders doesn’t inspire any more confidence for improved security than Calderon’s recent replacement of federal military forces with local police forces in the War on Drugs. As Diana Washington Valdez so brilliantly demonstrates in her 2006 book, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women, an arrangement forged between drug cartels and people in high places (with the cartels giving officials vast quantities of money in exchange for the officials giving the cartels and their rich friends and associates free reign) allowed the heinous femicide to occur without governmental intervention to deter, investigate, or prosecute.

But in this month of women’s celebration, let’s look to the future. If women in Juarez and elsewhere bear the brunt of poverty, inequality and violence, they also carry the richer resources for solving problems locally and globally. Persistent and proliferating poverty, discrimination, environmental degradation, drugs, and violence, conflict, and war — women around the world are tackling these problems with tools rarely brought to the larger arenas of business and government. Regional initiatives like the Observatorio de Transgresion Feminista and global organizations like JASS (Just Associates) and The Nobel Women’s Initiative, are but a few of the growing enterprises with which women seek to transform and humanize social and economic relationships. When International Women’s Day celebrates its 100th year next year, we can only imagine the conferences, exhibits, performances, proclamations, and chants, and who will be marching where and why.

Cancer, pulmonary disease, multiple sclerosis, sleep apnea, heart disease: Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans have suffered all these and more from toxic fumes spewing from burn pits on American bases. The Disabled American Veterans now has information on 182 sick veterans in a database developed by Assistant National Legislative director, Kerry Baker. Forty-eight have developed lymphoma, leukemia or other cancers; and 16 veterans in the database have died. And on March 30th, a group of seven lawmakers asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to attend to these findings as well the findings from an independent scientific consultant, which found a serious danger that veterans may become ill  from burn pit fumes.

As early as 2006, the DoD had been informed by Air Force Bioenvironmental Engineering Flight Commander Darrin Curtis that the pit was an acute health hazard. Though the Department of Defense has admitted that samples at the large burn pit at Balad contain Acetaldehyde, Acrolien, Arsenic, Benzene, Carbon Monoxide, Ethylbenzene,  Formaldehyde, Hydrogen Cyanide, Hydrogen Fluoride, Phosgene, Sulfur Dioxide, Sulfuric Acid, Toluene, Trichloroethane, Xylene, and other chemicals, to date, it  has insisted the pit presents no known dangers. The letter to Gates — signed by Senators Russ Feingold, D-Wis.; Evan Bayh, D-Ind; and Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; and Representatives Tim Bishop, D-N.Y.; Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.; John Hall, D-N.Y.; Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y.; and Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H. — urged vigilance, citing the protracted and painful lessons from Agent Orange.

Rep. Bishop’s office has developed a website in which veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan can tell their stories. In just a few days, many stories of negligence and suffering have emerged, adding to a tragic saga.

Dave

Dave was stationed at Balad, less than half a mile downwind from a double burn pit.

“They burned plastic, chemicals, tires, metal and who knows what else in that pit. Two months in everyone was coughing up black stuff. Three months in my black stuff started to include blood. I went to the clinic and the front desk turned me away. They said that I didn’t need to see a doctor because it was just the burn pit crud. They said, ‘A doctor cannot help you if you are not ill from a disease.’ Later in the deployment, the smoke was so bad that we all were puking from it. Found out later that it was probably arsenic in the smoke. An air force memo outlined Dioxin, the chemical that made everyone sick from agent orange, comes from burning the same materials that were in the burn pit. The DoD tries to say that the dioxin was of no threat to human life. … I might not be the smartest guy in the world but dioxin is dioxin and it’s harmful to humans no matter what the source. Be it agent orange or standing in the plume of the burn pit … But whatever, I came back home and was still coughing and having breathing problems. The doc gave me Sudafed.”

Dave’s Physical Training run time went from 10:12 to 13:59 in 6 months. His squad leader told him it was his fault. He should run even more, to run faster.

“So I took his advice … and then boom. Emergency room. Couldn’t breathe. Had to be put on a machine … And the salt in the wound: The DoD says that burning tires, plastics, chemicals, medical waste, metal, oil, etc. isn’t harmful. Which makes you wonder why it’s illegal to burn that stuff back at home. “

Terry

Terry, deployed with the 101st Division, was stationed in Balad.

“Two weeks after arriving in country on my most recent deployment to Balad, I started developing symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as Still’s Disease (Adult Onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis). The experts say that the disease is triggered by something to which you’re exposed.”

Terry is an Army Reserve Major and civilian airline pilot, and the illness has put both his military and civilian careers in jeopardy.

Kathy

Kathy was a staff sergeant with the National Guard in Balad.

She became sick while there, and once home was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease — hearing loss and tinnitus.

“My health began to slowly decline. Widespread muscle aches and pains w/stiffness gradually settled in, as did neuralgia and sleep apnea.”

She now sleeps with a breathing machine. Kathy has done extensive research and has found dozens of studies that have linked high concentration of particulate matter to cardiovascular problems, as well as to premature death.

Michael

Michael was stationed in Balad Iraq from Oct 2005 until June 2006.

“During this time I would always complain about the smoke. We were told it was safe. Well I started choking in my sleep waking up not breathing. At the time I was also being treated for PTSD so that’s what I was told it was from. I got medavaced from Balad in June. I seen another doctor; he told me that it did not sound like PTSD. I did a sleep study and I found out that I had sleep apnea really bad. since then I have had three surgeries on my face and now I have chronic pain in my face because the first surgery did not go well. I have breathing problems during the day, a problem with the lower part of my lungs so now I’m on inhalers. I never had any of these problems until I got to Balad. It has pretty much ruined my army career. It’s time someone is held responsible for negligence to me and my fellow soldiers going through the same thing.”

Robert

Robert was deployed to Balad, Iraq from February to June 2006.

“Virtually every night my tent was hazy and full of smoke and at times you could even see bits of ash floating in the air. The smell was so acrid that even holding your head on the sheet/blankets would not help you get that “clean” breathe of fresh air. I never got a good nights sleep there.”

Things he saw in the burn pit included 55-gallon drums of unknown fluids, tent parts, cabinets … anything from paper to the kitchen sink. He now has problems doing “normal tasks like moving boxes, putting on my boots, playing with my children … It feels like someone is grabbing me in the center of my chest and squeezing to prevent me getting a good breath … I find myself gasping for air and hyperventilating to catch my breath. For Robert, a 42-year-old father of six, “The most troubling of this isn’t my health as it is is the health and welfare of the thousands of other service men and women who have come and gone through Balad. My oldest two children also joined the Air Force … and ironically enough my oldest daughter is heading to Balad this summer on her third deployment to the same base. My son is also heading to Balad this summer on his first deployment. What is in their future … one can only hope …”

Derrol

Derrol was stationed at Bagram, Afghanistan and later Balad, Iraq as an Air Force reservist on active orders for over six years.

From the steady burning pits, he suffered both coughing and diarrhea. “An x-ray for a back problem showed that one half of my right lung was missing … they found 2 large nodules/masses in my lower right lung. A CT scan “showed a total of 7 nodules/masses in my right lung and scarring in my left. A Line of Duty was initiated and pushed through rather quickly to confirm the injury as active duty, deploy related. I contacted the VA and started a claim in November of 2007. I again deployed to Qatar for 4.5 months last summer and the claim was held until I was released from active duty in Sept 2008. It is now March 24, 2009 and I still have not heard from VA as to my medical board rating for compensation and disability. I also have problems with my stomach now and shortness of breath, I am still waiting on VA.”

John and Wallace both worked for KBR at Balad. They both now have colon cancer.

***

More first-hand reports from veterans can be found on the online Military Times.

Veterans who are suffering health problems they believe are connected to burn pit fumes should report their condition to Kerry Baker at 202-314-5229, to add to the database.

How infuriating has it been, the last five years, watching Halliburton and KBR get away with murder? Murder, poisoning, electrocution, rape, human trafficking, fraud, bribery — their crimes go on and on. But could their decade-long spree may be coming to an end? This year, settlements for old offenses, new exposés and new lawsuits for more recent evil-doings, have resulted in plummeting stock prices, canceled contracts, and a soon-to-be imprisoned former CEO.

The latest blow came last Thursday, in a Texas court, where executives for Halliburton and KBR were described in legal papers as conducting a “reign of terror” and functioning “as criminal enterprises.” Paying bribes, taking kickbacks, concealing gang rapes, and engaging in human trafficking were among the crimes listed on the May 14th complaint brought not by government or human rights lawyers, as you might expect, but by attorneys filing a class action suit for the pension fund of Detroit’s Policemen and Firemen. According to the press release issued by the funds’ attorneys, Grant & Eisenhofer, Halliburton and KBR’s directors enabled “a pervasive environment of misdeed and corruption,” resulting in suits, investigations, fines, penalties, and settlements of over $650 million, which have ravaged the corporations’ reputations, prospects, finances, and in turn the pension fund’s investment.

The complaint charges that executives hid pending investigations from shareholders until after KBR was spun off in 2006. Months later, the new KBR paid a settlement to the government for violating the U.S. False Claims Act through double-billing and inflating prices for goods and services for troops in Kosovo. In 2007, a report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction cited KBR for widespread waste, mismanagement, improper documentation, and lack of oversight, and the General Accounting Office recommended that the government withold a KBR contract. In 2008, Albert “Jack” Stanley, former CEO of KBR/Halliburton, admitted to coordinating briberies of Nigerian officials to secure contracts worth $6 billion. In February of this year, Halliburton agreed to pay $579 million in fines and penalties to settle the bribery charges, and Stanley now faces his own $10.8 million fine and seven years in prison.

The Texas suit covers the period both before and after KBR became an independent company, and names the majority of the two companies’ recent and current boards, including such corporate heavyweights as past president and chairman of American Airlines, Robert Crandall. The May 14th press release by attorneys originally listed former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney as a defendant (not surprising, since most of the Nigerian bribes occurred under Cheney’s tenure; Cheney also appointed and directly supervised Stanley), but a hastily issued correction stated that Cheney had been listed in error. The complaint identified some of Halliburton’s and KBR’s known “misdeeds” in Iraq, including providing troops with untreated, untested water from the Euphrates and delivering ice to troops in a truck that showed signs of its former use as storage for corpses. The complaint concluded, “The myriad crimes and wrongdoings discussed above simply could not have happened if Defendants were doing their jobs. As officers and directors of the Companies, the Defendants were required to ensure that the Companies’ internal controls were in place, functioning properly, and sufficiently strong to prevent it from committing wrongful or illegal acts.”

The Detroit pension fund suit is one of many recent suits against Halliburton and KBR. In November 2008, Joshua Eller, a civilian employee at Balad Air Force base northeast of Baghdad, cited rotten food, contaminated water and ice, and toxic fumes from open burn pits, as contributors to his ongoing depression, nightmares, and gastrointestinal and dermatological conditions. In March 2009, parents of Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth sued KBR for wrongful death from electrocution in the shower at his Green Zone base. In April 2009, troops, private employees, and families filed nine lawsuits against KBR for compensation for illness and deaths from exposure to toxic fumes from Iraq and Afghanistan burn pits. The suits, which lawyers will be pursuing as a class-action, seek damages “in an amount sufficient to strip defendants of all of the revenue and profits” involved in managing waste for military bases.”

But the pension fund suit is the first initiated by shareholders, and the stakes are high. Grant and Eisenhofer is a formidable opponent, ranking first among plaintiff firms in funds recovered for shareholder clients. The firm is currently involved in class action suits against Barclays Bank, Countrywide Financial, UBS, Pfizer,and Merck as well as Tremont Holdings Group Inc, a fund charged with feeding $3 billion of client investments to Bernard Madoff Securities.

Since 2004, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has fed $13 billion taxpayer dollars to U.S. military contractors for “unsupported” costs, and most often the recipient of the questionable payment has been KBR. This according to testimony earlier this month before the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Pentagon’s chief contract auditor, April Stephenson. All in all, KBR owes the government $100 million for overcharges and fraud, and Senators Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have written to Secretary Gates asking that the Pentagon do more to recover the money. In the meantime, fraud — and larceny and rape and murder — not withstanding, KBR remains the largest DoD contractor and one of three companies selected by them to bid on war-zone contracts, under the DoD Logcap (Logistics Civil Augmentation) Program.

What will it take to end the crime-spree of Halliburton, KBR, and their likes? This March, in Hays County, Texas, Iraq veterans who’d seen KBR crimes up close appeared, along with local activists, at the county commissioners meeting where a road-building contract with KBR was to be executed. So informed and persuasive was their testimony of KBR atrocities, fraud, and corruption, that commissioners voted unanimously, in April, to rescind the KBR contract. Now that was a class act, a rousing opener for this month’s class action from Detroit.

The media were so busy linking alleged Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan to international Islamic terrorism the last few weeks that they hardly noted the execution of the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammad, on November 10th. Seven years ago, Muhammad was at the top of conservative commentators’ Islamofascists-with-Links-to-Al Qaeda lists. Now, like then, the search for foreign links is proving to be a fruitless, distracting us from the abundant evidence of a causal connection between such murders and service in the U.S. military.

Consider the case of John Allen Muhammad, (formerly John Allen Williams). In her recently published memoir, Scared Silent, Mildred Muhammad, the later of his two ex-wives, writes that her husband went to the 1991 Gulf War a “happy,” “focused, and “intelligent” man, who returned home “depressed,” “totally confused,” and “violent,” making her fear for her life. In their briefs, Muhammad’s appeals lawyers stressed that his “severe mental illness” never came up at trial, where he was allowed to represent himself despite obvious mental incompetence. (Till the end, he maintained his innocence, claiming that at the time of the killing spree he was in Germany for dental work.)

In seeking clemency and a stay of execution, Muhammad’s lawyers presented psychiatric reports diagnosing Schizophrenia and brain scans documenting profound malformations consistent with psychotic disease. Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor Virginia Governor Tim Kaine were impressed. According to Governor Kaine, “crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand….” And one day before Veterans Day, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection.

Muhammad’s lawyers might have included other facts.

Mental disorders from depression to mood swings, thought disorders, violent outbursts, and delusions are not uncommon among Gulf War veterans in addition to physical symptoms such as rashes, vertigo, respiratory and gastrointestinal problem, and neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, ALS, and brain tumors. According to Dr. William E. Baumzweiger, a California psychiatrist with expertise in psychiatric ailments of Gulf War veterans, “a small but significant number of Gulf War veterans become homicidal” seemingly “out of nowhere.” Indeed as early as 1994, University of Texas epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley, the preeminent researcher of Gulf War disease, had demonstrated that the brain scans of veterans with Gulf War illness were distinctly abnormal.

Last year a blue-panel, congressionally-mandated Gulf War Research Advisory Committee (RAC) finally confirmed what veterans and their families have long asserted: That “without a doubt,” Gulf War illness, as it’s come to be called, is a profound, multi-system physical illness “caused” by brain-damaging chemicals to which troops were exposed by the Department of Defense. The RAC report identified three specific neurotoxins as certain culprits: anti-nerve gas pills that troops were forced to take (or risk court martial), insecticides and repellants that drenched troops’ tents, clothing, and gear, and nerve gases including sarin (the killer chemical in the Tokyo subway attack) emitted into the air when U.S. forces dismantled and demolished a vast munitions storage facility in Khamisiyah, Iraq. Muhammad’s lawyers pointed to childhood beatings as a cause of his psychiatric disease and brain malformation, claiming that Gulf War syndrome exacerbated these conditions. But they didn’t mention that Mohammad had no history of mental illness before the war–and that during the war he was stationed in Khamisiyah.

It probably wouldn’t have helped. In 2002, another Gulf War veteran, Louis Jones Jr. was executed for the 1995 rape and murder of a young female soldier, Pvt. Tracie Joy McBride. Like Sergeant Muhammad, Sergeant Jones was an exemplary soldier decorated in the war; but also like Muhammad, he returned from Desert Storm depressed, disoriented, and increasingly anti-social and bizarre. Like Muhammad, his defense was inadequate–but his appeals lawyer displayed MRIs and other scans of his abnormal brain, arguing that it was evidence of the brain damage from toxins he and other veterans with Gulf War disease were exposed to in-country. Supporting the petition for clemency was the written testimony of Dr. Haley that “there is now a compelling involuntary link between Mr. Jones’ neurotoxic war injury and his inexplicable crime.” Like Muhammad, Jones was stationed in Khamisiyah during the demolition, which poisoned thousands of troops and then thousands more as sarin plumes traveled far and wide, a fact the government hid for close to a decade.

And then there’s the case of Timothy McVeigh. We have no scans of his brain, but we have ample reports of his mental state before and after Desert Storm, and evidence that the war changed him profoundly. In their biography, American Terrorist, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck paint a vivid picture of McVeigh’s days in the ground war. The enthusiastic young marksman, at first, happily followed orders and shot an Iraqi soldier manning a machine gun over a mile away. When a bloody mist replaced the soldier’s head in his viewfinder, McVeigh was disturbed and discharged the rest of his round into empty desert sand. Later, after Saddam had agreed to a UN and Soviet brokered ceasefire, McVeigh was further shocked and shaken by orders to kill defeated Iraqi soldiers traveling home on the highway from Kuwait to Iraq (come to be known as the “Highway of Death” for the thousands that U.S. Forces corralled and massacred on the night of Feb 26, 1991). He watched the road in horror as dogs chewed on human limbs, and as human bodies without arms or legs tried to crawl away.

In his famous 60 Minutes interview ten years later, McVeigh would tell Ed Bradley that the killing changed him. He found himself thinking, “I’m in this person`s country. What right did I have to come over to his country and kill him? …How did he ever transgress against me?” He went over thinking, “Not only is Saddam evil, all Iraqis are evil.” But quickly it was “an entirely different ballgame… face to face…you realize they`re just people like you.” He told Bradley that the government modeled brutal violence. In a 1998 prison essay he objected to the United State’s continuing campaign against Iraq: It was the U.S. that had “set the standard” for “stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction.

McVeigh’s experience in the Gulf War surely altered his thinking. But did it also alter his brain? What toxins might have entered his body on the highway where U.S. forces had just dropped cluster bombs and 500-ton bombs, napalm and depleted uranium, incinerating thousands vehicles and the people inside. He told Ed Bradley that when he came back “something didn`t feel right in me, but..I couldn`t say what it was.” Psychological trauma alone, neeruoscientist now tell us, affects not only psyches but brains. Sophisticated neuroimaging shows the brains of those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to be abnormal in areas regulating memory retrieval and inhibition (hippocampus), fearfulness and focus (pre-frontal cortex), and emotionality and lability (amygdala). The hippocampus of Alzheimer’s sufferers are also shrunken and the amygdala of bi-polar sufferers have enhanced activation similar to those with PTSD.

Unlike McVeigh, Muhammad, or Jones, Major Hasan was not exposed to war’s toxins, nor to its traumas first-hand. Day after day, though, soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, or on their way back, relived before him attacks and atrocities they had inflicted, suffered, and/or witnessed, altering his views and his mind. In the beginning of his Army training and service, by all accounts, Nidal Hasan was proud to serve his country. His examination of the internal conflict within Muslim GIs asked to kill other Muslims – prohibited in the Koran– started out an academic project to enhance the Army’s understanding and management of the dilemma. But as Hasan’s exposure to mentally disturbed soldiers’ memories, fears, and guilt increased, so evidently did his own internal strife and, in all likelihood, the secondary PTSD common to family members, friends, and professionals in close contact with victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of catastrophes.

Even the most astute of commentators, like New York Times columnist Frank Rich, are wondering if Hasan is an “actual terrorist or an unfathomable mass murderer merely dabbling in jihadist ideas.” But Major Hasan’s religion was only one of several aspects of his being shattered by the stories he was charged with hearing. The troubled GI who opened fire on fellow soldiers at a counseling center in Fort Liberty earlier this year was not a Muslim, although some right-wing blogs initially suggested he was. In truth, the violence soldiers and veterans inflict against other Americans is not unfathomable at all.

The fire power expended on Iraq in the six-war was greater than that used in all wars in history combined, exceeded only by today’s continuing sequel. The savage murder of civilians, though not on the radar of most producers and consumers of American media, smolders in the minds of many troops and veterans of all backgrounds serving in all three recent wars in the region. Troops on U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the local citizens, suffer the fumes from open burn pits the depth of city blocks and the length of small towns; blast injuries from IEDs continue to damage the interiors of bodies and brains, often with no external breakage or bleading, causing, eminent neurologists say, a new kind of brain injury not seen before in the chronicles of war. Chemical fumes, powders, and liquids from military and industrial facilities bombed in both Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom continue to contaminate earth, water, and air. Were today’s wars to end tomorrow, the consequences of our invasions would not. For decades and perhaps centuries, Iraqis and Afghans will suffer disease and deprivation, and invading and occupying troops will carry the war back home, as soldiers always do, but with brains, bodies, and minds shattered as never before.

As the U.S. criminal justice system closes the case of Sergeant Muhammad and takes up that of Major Hasan, who will identify and prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility for these heinous mass murders? The current trend in international war crimes and crimes against humanity is to consign crimes committed by individuals to national courts, and to apply international justice to those at the highest levels of government who make the decisions implemented on the ground. Brutal murders by American veterans and troops of fellow soldiers and citizens were surely not the outcomes planned by our leaders, but by now they are too common and too linked to wartime exposures to be considered unanticipated or unfathomable.

In October a class action suit combining 22 lawsuits from 43 states was filed in US District Court in Maryland against KBR, Halliburton, and other military contractors for damages to health from open air burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.  According to plaintiffs’ lawyers the military contracting giant had been paid millions of dollars to safely dispose of waste on bases but negligently burned refuse in open pits, spewing toxins, including known carcinogens, into the air. Last week, KBR sought to dismiss the charges. Their tack was not to deny that they burned lithium batteries, petroleum, asbestos, trucks, cars, paint, plastic, Styrofoam, medical waste including human limbs, and more, as the soldiers have charged, but to challenge their liability for any ensuing problems.  According to KBR’s press fact sheet on the suit, the Army, not KBR, decides if a burn pit or an incinerator will be used, where it will be built in relation to living and working facilities, and what it can burn. KBR insists it was and is still  just “performing under the direction and control of military commanders in the field.” In short, they were only following orders and the soldiers are going after the wrong guy.

But in the Bush-Cheney government, the DoD and its contractor were best buddies if not one and the same guy. As Defense Secretary, when the large scale  privatization of the military’s civil logistics activities was still just a gleam in his eye, Cheney paid KBR almost  $9 million to study the feasibility and advisability of private companies handling massive logistics. In a classified report, KBR determined that privatizing civilian logistics was a good idea for the governement, and later that year Cheney awarded KBR the first comprehensive LOGCAP contract. Three years later Cheney became CEO of Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR. Two years after that, KBR was fired by the Clinton DoD for fraudulent billing, only to be rehired when the Bush Cheney DoD renewed its contract in 2001. KBR is the largest government contractor in Iraq, earning more than $20 billion dollars for logistical support of troops alone, often in no-bid contracts riddled with obvious but overlooked fraud.

Until recently, the DoD was deaf to the stories coming out of Iraq about “plume crud” and “black goop,” as soldiers have termed the dark slime that those living and working close to the burn pits’ black smoke blow out of their noses and cough, spit, and vomit from their mouths, or the reports of breathing problems, cancers, and deaths. But they clearly knew about the practices and its problems of the pits its contractors had built and continued to run.  As early as 2006 Air Force Bioenvironmental Engineering Flight Commander Darrin Curtis warned senior officials about the risks of the largest burn pit at the Balad Airbase 70 kilometers north of Baghdad. In a memo he titled “Burn Pit Health Hazards,” he wrote, “It is amazing that the burn pit has been able to operate without restrictions over the past few years without significant engineering controls being put in place.” Curtis cited the toxic byproducts of the burning waste, including benzene, arsenic, sulfuric acid, and other carcinogens, as “an acute health hazard for individuals” and the smoke itself as a possible “chronic health hazard.” In 2008, the Pentagon distributed a burn pit fact sheet to troops, acknowledging some carcinogens in 2004-2006 air samples reported in classified studies, but asserting that “the potential short- and long-term risks were estimated to be low due to the infrequent detections of these chemicals….Based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidance, long-term health effects are not expected to occur from breathing the smoke.” The fact sheet failed to mention that 2007 air samples found toxic particulates, including dioxin, benzene, cyanide, and arsenic at as many as six times the allowable levels.

Thanks to courageous soldiers, their families, veterans groups, and reporters, the truth is emerging. Kelly Kennedy, a reporter for the independent Gannett Co newsweekly the Military Times,  first challenged the official story in the press, in October 2008, in one of a long series of compelling pieces on troop health and burn-pits that this week earned her Columbia University School of Journalismn’s prestigious Oakes Prize certificate of merit. In her article “Burn Pit at Balad Raises Health Concerns,” Kennedy wrote that though the government denies it, “tens of thousands of troops, contractors and Iraqis” may have been exposed to “cancer-causing dioxins, poisons such as arsenic and carbon monoxide, and hazardous medical waste.” The story stimulated a strong response among sick troops, as Kennedy reported in a Decemeber 2008 follow-up piece: “Though military officials say there are no known long-term effects from exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 100 service members have come forward to Military Times and Disabled American Veterans with strikingly similar symptoms: chronic bronchitis, asthma, sleep apnea, chronic coughs and allergy-like symptoms. Several also have cited heart problems, lymphoma and leukemia.” Kennedy quoted Kerry Baker, DAV legislative director and collaborator in information gathering:  “Everything seems to be pointing opposite to what the Defense Department is saying.”

President Obama has said that the White House is paying attention and that he will make sure that the burn pits don’t become another Agent Orange. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki has made similar remarks: “How do we change what has been the 40-year journey of Agent Orange, the 20-year journey of Gulf War Illness, and prevent a similar journey for burn pit smoke?” Congress has begun to address the matter with legislation that mandates regular reporting on the burn pits and examination of alternatives but no shutting down of the 80 pits still operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon has held out the longest, insisting till now that no evidence of health problems exists beyond temporary irritations. Last month, R. Craig Postlewaite, the Pentagon’s acting director of force health protection and readiness, stated that “some people probably have suffered some untoward health effects.” By Postlewaite’s calculation, 56 percent of troops returning from war zones report exposure to burn-pit smoke.

According to Susan Burke, the Virginia attorney initiating the class action suit, the burn-pit maladies are pulmonary for the most part. Her co-counsel, the DC office of the law firm Motley, Rice, cites on its website some 25 problems including asthma; bronchitis; cancer of the brain, bone, skin, and blood; infections; unexpected weight loss; sleep apnea; and weeping lesions. In their motion to dismiss, KBR maintains that no evidence links smoke exposure to such conditions. But more importantly, they claim, it has little to do with them since they were only following the command of its trusted leaders. The Obama administration has taken steps to trim KBR’s wings and its multi-million dollar over-charges. But KBR continues to be the government’s largest military contractor, and how the two sort out liability for the massive level of troop illnesses emerging from our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remains to be seen. If the case goes forward, KBR has said in its recent court motions, they would ask the court to “substitute” the military’s judgment “across numerous matters,” law360.com reports. What such legalese means is unclear but intriguing, leaving us to wonder if KBR means to point a finger or continue to work hand-in-hand with an old friend.

Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet
March 18, 2009

Acetaldehyde, Acrolien, Arsenic, Benzene, Carbon Monoxide, Ethylbenzene,  Formaldehyde, Hydrogen Cyanide, Hydrogen Fluoride, Phosgene, Sulfur Dioxide, Sulfuric Acid, Toluene, Trichloroethane, Xylene. These are just some of the chemicals detected in smoke from the Balad Burn Pit, one of the many vast open pits spewing toxic plumes over Iraq and Afghanistan.

But not to worry; In “Just the Facts,” an information sheet for troops, the Department of Defense has stated that “the potential short- and long-term risks” from Balad “were estimated to be low.” The VA has just announced it will monitor reports of veterans’ pit-related illness. But the DoD has yet to declassify old air sample reports or issue current findings.

The Pentagon’s fact sheet appeared after VAWatchdog.com linked to a memo showing that, as early as 2006, the DoD had known that the pit was “an acute health hazard.” In the memo, titled “Burn Pit Health Hazards,” Air Force Bioenvironmental Engineering Flight Commander Darrin Curtis wrote to authorities that he found it “amazing that the burn pit has been able to operate without restrictions over the past few years without significant engineering controls being put in place.” In an accompanying memo, James R. Elliott, Chief of Air Force Aeromedical Services, concurred that the pit’s fumes contained “known carcinogens” and “respiratory sensitizers” that posed a “chronic and acute health hazard to our troops and the local population.”

“Iraqi Crud” and “Black Goop”

This week, the same memo was boldly posted on Wikileaks, more widely publicizing toxic exposure and governmental neglect. The evidence is clear. The Balad Burn pit is a Big Bad Burn Pit which burns most anything that comes its way including medical waste, styrofoam, and plastic. Soldiers, contractors, foreign workers, and Iraqis suffer what troops call “Iraqi crud,” whose symptoms include a hacking cough and black phlegm that goes by the name “black goop.” According to Army Times reporter Kelley Kennedy, “Though military officials say there are no known long-term effects from exposure to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 100 service members have come forward to Military Times and Disabled American Veterans with strikingly similar symptoms: chronic bronchitis, asthma, sleep apnea, chronic coughs and allergy-like symptoms. Several also have cited heart problems, lymphoma and leukemia.” Kevin Wilkins, an Air Force reservist, died last year after returning home from a tour of Balad and Qatar; his wife blames the pit. A year after working at Balad as a nurse, Wilkens was admitted to the hospital for a relentless headache and vomiting, symptoms that began in country. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died a week later.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) has taken up the cause. Six years into the war in Iraq, many bases are still without incinerators. In Afghanistan, U.S. bases have no incinerators. General David Petraeus claims the Pentagon is employing more incinerators, but that burn pits go with the territory: “There is and will continue to be a need for burn pits during contingency operations,” Petraeus wrote to Feingold.

Denial and Obfuscation

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a spokesman for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, claims the DoD carefully samples air at Balad and other bases with burn pits and all is well. “The bottom line on all of this sampling is that we have not identified anything, where there are troops, where it would have been hazardous to their health,” Kilpatrick said.

Take it from where it comes. Between 1997 and 2002, Michael Kilpatrick directed the Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf War Illness, where his main purpose seemed to be to promote stress — and only stress — as the link between wartime experience and veterans illness. In those five years, he spent $250 “without publishing any medical research report or offering a single treatment program for ill GW veterans,” according to veterans advocate Steve Robinson. According to the General Accounting Office (GAO), Kilpatrick’s fixed position discouraged scientists from applying for grants for research on Gulf War illness, leaving pioneering work, such as that by Dr. Robert Haley, to rely on private funding. Despite compelling finding as early as 1998, that Gulf War illness was caused by brain damage from neurotoxins,  Kilpatrick insisted that  veterans’ headaches, dizziness, fatigue, bone and joint pain, memory loss, poor concentration, muscle weakness, skin rashes and sores, and gastrointestinal problems, and even  amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) could be linked only to stress. Since then, Kilpatrick has gone on to use his medical credential to discount the dangers of depleted uranium, hide the DoD’s non-compliance with pre- and post-deployment screening, and obfuscate the facts around distribution of anti-nerve gas pre-treatment pills, a major cause of Gulf War illness. And now he’s whitewashing Balad’s black fumes and “black goop”

The KBR Connection: Will There Be Accountability?

One Georgia man is having none Dr. Kilpatrick’s reassurances. In November, Joshua Eller, a civilian draftman, initiated what he hopes will be a class action suit against contractor KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton, for exposing people at the Balad base to unsafe water, food and hazardous burn pit fumes.

The suit claims that “all across Iraq and … not confined to Balad” KBR provided bathing water that was not disinfected, including according to former KBR employee testimony, water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers that was polluted with sewage.  Regularly, KBR served soldiers spoiled, expired and rotten food and used dishes that may have been contaminated with shrapnel. The lawsuit claims that the plaintiff suffers from chronic skin lesions, abdominal distress, and nightmares.

KBR dumped medical waste, including needles, bandages, and body parts in the open pit. On one occasion,” the suit states, the plaintiff “witnessed a wild dog running around base with a human arm in its mouth.
]]> http://noraeisenberg.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/burning-toxic-waste-is-making-us-soldiers-and-iraqis-sick-but-the-pentagon-refuses-to-admit-it/feed/ 2 noraeisenberg http://noraeisenberg.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/the-most-pervasive-combat-injury-among-us-soldiers-is-invisible-and-the-pentagon-has-tried-to-keep-it-that-way/ http://noraeisenberg.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/the-most-pervasive-combat-injury-among-us-soldiers-is-invisible-and-the-pentagon-has-tried-to-keep-it-that-way/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:03:16 +0000 noraeisenberg http://noraeisenberg.wordpress.com/?p=155 Continue reading →]]> Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet
March 17, 2009

March is Brain Injury Awareness Month and to observe it, the Pentagon did something special: it told the truth.

In a news conference on March 4th, Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton estimated that as many as 360,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan may have suffered service-related brain injuries. Until now the Pentagon estimated that some 10,000 veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq war had suffered brain traumas.

It’s about time they got it right. Almost a year ago, in April 2008, an independent report by the RAND Corporation estimated that some 320,000 troops — 20 percent of the deployed troops — had suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI). Included in the RAND figure were blast-induced neurotraumas (BINT) from new weaponry like improvised explosive devices, during which the head remains closed and, more often than not, the victim remains conscious. These closed-brain blast injuries are the most common injury — brain or otherwise — of the current wars, but until now, for the DoD, they didn’t count.

“Just a Concussion”

Admitting to the incidence of the injury is a start, but the DoD has yet to admit its potential gravity. The DoD did not count closed-head blast injuries because they deemed them mild traumatic brain injuries, commonly referred to as concussions. In December 2008, another independent report, prepared for the VA by the Institute of Medicine, warned that the blast-induced neurotrauma might be something distinctive and far more serious than the mild TBI or concussions associated with closed-head injury. According to George R. Rutherford, of the Department of Epidimiology and Biostatistics at UC Medical School, San Francisco, the chair of the OIM committee that wrote the report, these blast-induced neurotraumas, seem unlike injuries we’ve seen before: “We’re all worried that the blast neurotrauma hasn’t really made it into the human literature.”

Unfortunately, in the same news conference in which Brig. Gen Sutton offered new numbers, Lt. Col. Lynne Lowe, TBI Program Director in the Office of the Army Surgeon General, assured that blast injuries are just a concussion — “the same as we see in a football game on TV.” “Providers can give medication for headaches or dizziness, and reassure them that they will be OK … ” Not true. Many veterans have long-lasting and serious symptoms.

An IED explosion produces high-pressured air waves that move at 1,600 feet a second, spreading hundreds of yards. The blast then strikes again: high-pressured air displaced by the first blast flies back to the site of the explosion in a “secondary wind.” Even without penetration, the brain and other organs can sustain profound injury. According to Keith Young, vice-chair of research at Texas A&M and the VA Center for Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans, “The blast is so close and so large, it seems to be shaking the brain. My guess is that this causes micro-bleeds.” Others speak of diffuse axonal damage.

Yet the “It’s Just a Concussion” theory pervades the DoD. The Walter Reed Army Institute for Research (WRAIR) website offers “General Questions an Answers” about blast injuries that deem them “no different” from concussions on a “football field,” which “usually resolve … within a few days.” The Q & A discourages screening, lest soldiers with simple concussions think they have a brain injury.

“It’s Just in Your Head”

Complementing the “It’s Just a Concussion Theory” is the “It’s Just in Your Head” theory that the DoD and VA developed after the first Gulf War to explain Gulf War illness. A much touted 2008 Army study led by Charles W, Hoge, Director of the Division of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported that while soldiers with mild brain traumas were found to have more health problems, it was due to their “PTSD and depression” not their TBI. But as researchers like Johns Hopkins’ Ibolja Cernak, MD, PhD, have demonstrated, soldiers with blast injuries have a high incidence of PTSD and depression in addition to problems with attention, concentration, memory, headaches, dizziness, seizures, gait, nausea, mood, and vision, among others.

The Pentagon is a vast beast, as uncoordinated and incoherent as it is rigid and rule-ridden. Thus while WRAIR informational material minimizes the BINT, WRAIR’s own Blast Neurotrauma Research Program seeks “to characterize potential biomechanical and biological mechanisms of injury, and the pathophysiological, neuropathological and neurologic impairments that resulted from exposure to explosive blast.” And new initiatives like the Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine and the National Intrepid Center of Excellence as well renewed activity in older organizations like the Defense and Brain Injury Center are undertaking research into the nature and viable treatment of this new brain injury. This, like Brig. Gen. Sutton’s disclosure, is encouraging.

The Truth Is Beginning to Come Out

The OIM remarks and recommendations on injuries in the current wars appeared in “Gulf War and Health: Long-term Consequences of Traumatic Brain Injury,” the seventh of a series of OIM reports on the health outcomes of the 1991 war. Eighteen years after Desert Storm, the truth about the devastating illness that followed a third of our troops home, is only now emerging. In November, the Research Advisory Committee, a congressionally-mandated committee of high-level scientists, reported that Gulf War illness was “without a doubt” “caused” by neurotoxins the government had exposed troops to, including experimental anti-nerve gas pretreatment pills, insecticides and insect repellants, and sarin pluming from munitions facilities the U.S. had bombed. The committee criticized the “skewed” and “unscientific” research directed by VA and other bureaucracies, which suppressed evidence of the chemical causes and organic nature of Gulf War illness, in favor of bogus claims that wartime stress had caused an essentially psychological ailment. The report lamented that after 18 years there is still no treatment for the more than 200,000 troops suffering from Gulf War illness, a disease caused by profound neurological damage.

Eight years is better than eighteen for telling the truth. But there’s much more truth to learn and tell. The blast injuries of Americans — and Iraqis — will remain when Brain Injury Awareness Month passes. Robert Gates’s reformulated Pentagon has agreed to show us our dead soldiers. Now we need a thorough coherent approach to diagnosing, healing, and compensating the living afflicted by the current wars. Pre- and post-deployment neuropsychological testing and imaging studies would be an important step as would silencing the misinformation of Army spokespeople eager to discount the hidden wounds distinctive to this tragic war.

February 27, 2009

With rare exceptions, American politicians seem incapable of opposing an American war without befriending another in a different place or time.

Barack Obama, an early and ardent enemy of the Iraq War, quickly declared his affinity for a war in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. And like so many Democratic leaders, he has commended Bush 41′s Gulf War over Bush 43′s, for its justifiable cause, clear goals, quick execution and admirable leadership.

It’s difficult to determine the proportion of expedience to ignorance that allows politicians and pundits to advance the theory of the good and trouble-free Gulf War. What’s clear, though, is that for close to 20 years, the 42-day war, in which we dropped more bombs than were dropped in all wars combined in the history of the world, maintains a special place in American hearts.

But as John R. MacArthur amply demonstrates in The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, the real 1991 war was kept from the American public. This week, as we commemorate the 18th anniversary of the Gulf War’s end, and opportunities for new hostilities beckon, Americans, and our leaders, would do well to take a hard look at the war that we continue to love only because we never got to see it.

Despite our inability to detect it at the time, U.S. prosecution of the 1991 war with Iraq relied on all the now-familiar and discredited strategies used to promote the present war — with equally disastrous and far-reaching results.

Bogus Justification

When Saddam Hussein summoned April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, to his office on July 25, 1990, it was to determine what the U.S. response would be should he invade Kuwait with the 30,000 troops he had amassed on its border. According to the Iraqi transcript published in the New York Times two months later, he told the seasoned diplomat that Iraq had defended the region against the Iranian fundamentalist regime, and that the Kuwaitis were paying them back by encroaching on their border, siphoning their oil, increasing oil production and driving down prices. His people were suffering, and his “patience was running out.”

Glaspie commiserated: “I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. … I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late ’60s. The instruction we had during this period was that … the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.”

Glaspie later claimed that Iraq transcripts contained “distortions,” which may be so. But her own recently declassified cable to Washington closely resembles the Iraqi transcripts: She wrote that she asked Saddam, “in the spirit of friendship, not confrontation” about his intentions with Kuwait. She reports telling him that “she had served in Kuwait 20 years before; then as now we took no position on these Arab affairs.” She wrote that “Saddam’s emphasis that he wants peaceful settlement is surely sincere … but the terms might be difficult to achieve.”

Glaspie was not the only official to deliver this laissez-faire message. The next day, at a Washington press conference, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler was asked by a journalist if the U.S. had sent any diplomatic protest to Iraq for putting 30,000 troops on the border with Kuwait. “I’m entirely unaware of any such protest,” Tutweiler replied.

Five days later, on July 31, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs John Kelly testified to Congress that the “United States has no commitment to defend Kuwait, and the U.S. has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq.”

Two days later, when Saddam entered Kuwait, he had no reason to believe that the U.S. would come to Kuwait’s defense with a half-million troops. Or that when he tried to negotiate a retreat though Arab leaders, the U.S. would refuse to talk. In 1990 as in 2002, a Bush president had his mind set on war.

Disinformation

If the White House and Pentagon were fixed on a war with Iraq, during the summer and early fall of 1990, the American public and Congress were not. To change that, the week after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government, disguising itself as “Citizens for a Free Kuwait,” hired the global PR firm of Hill & Knowlton to win Americans’ hearts and minds.

In charge of the Washington office of Hill & Knowlton was Craig Fuller, a close friend of George H.W. Bush and his chief of staff when he was vice president. For $11.8 million, Fuller and more than 100 H&K executives across the country oversaw the selling of the war.

They organized public rallies, provided pro-war speakers, lobbied politicians, developed and distributed information kits and news releases, including scores of video news releases shown by stations and networks as if they were bona fide journalism and not paid-for propaganda.

H&K’s research arm, the Wirthlin Group, conducted daily polls to identify the messages and language that would resonate most with Americans. In the 1982 Emmy award-winning Canadian Broadcasting Corp. documentary To Sell a War, a Wirthlin executive explained that their research had determined the most emotionally moving message to be “Saddam Hussein was a madman who had committed atrocities even against his own people and had tremendous power to do further damage, and he needed to be stopped.”

To fit the bill, H&K concocted stories, including one told by a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah, to another H&K concoction, the House Human Rights Caucus looking to pass as a congressional committee. According to the caucus, Nayirah’s full name would remain secret in order to deter the Iraqis from punishing her family in occupied Kuwait. The girl wept as she testified before the caucus, apparently still shaken by the atrocity she witnessed as a volunteer in a Kuwait City hospital.

According to her written testimony, she had seen “the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where … babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

During the three months between Nayirah’s testimony and the start of the war, the story of babies tossed from their incubators stunned Americans. Bush told the story, and television anchors and talk-show hosts recycled it for days. It was read into the congressional record as fact and discussed at the U.N. General Assembly.

By the time it emerged that Nayirah was a Kuwaiti royal and the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and that she had never volunteered in any hospital and that the incident and her testimony had been provided by H&K, it was too late. The war had already begun.

Another concoction was top-secret satellite images that the Pentagon claimed to have of 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks on the Kuwait-Saudi border, visible proof that Saddam would be advancing soon on Saudi Arabia. Yet the St. Petersburg Times acquired two commercial Russian satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, that showed no Iraqi troops near the Saudi border, and the scientific experts whom the Times hired could identify nothing but sand at the supposed location of the advancing army.

But the St. Petersburg Times story evaporated, and the Pentagon’s story stuck. When Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on Sept. 11, 1990, he reported that developments in the Gulf were “as significant as they were tragic”: Iraqi troops and tanks had moved to the south “to threaten Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi reluctance to host foreign troops and bases that would desecrate their sacred sites, the holiest in all of Islam, gave way in the face of an imminent invasion, and the war had its staging area. American discomfort with a war to defend a country most had never heard of began to transform into dread that the Saudi oil they relied on would be swallowed up by a monster.

Censorship

In the lead-up to war, U.S. media organizations, with rare exceptions, had begun to back away from investigative reporting and journalistic scrutiny. Once the war began, government censorship combined with this self-censorship produced a media blackout. The restrictions on the press were tighter than during any earlier American war. Journalists could not travel except in pools with military escorts, and even then most sites were off-limits.

Pentagon censors had to clear all war dispatches, photos and footage before they could be released. Department of Defense guidelines stated that stories would not be judged for “potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment,” but journalists weren’t taking any chances. When news anchors weren’t hosting retired generals and pundits, or screening eerie green images of the coordinates of the day’s targets, they were praising the military on a job well done.

Two months after the war ended, the editors of 15 news outlets protested to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney about the Pentagon’s control. But the damage had been done. The real war was never reported to the American public.

What We Missed and Need to Remember

Americans never saw images of even one of the 100,000 civilians killed in the aerial war, just coordinates of precision-guided strikes, the majority of which missed their marks.

We never learned that the government’s goals had changed from expelling Saddam’s forces from Kuwait to destroying Iraq’s infrastructure. Or what a country with a destroyed infrastructure looks like — with most of its electricity, telecommunications, sewage system, dams, railroads and bridges blown away.

There were no photos or stories of the start of the ground war on Feb. 24, 1991, after Iraq had agreed to a Russian-brokered withdrawal. We never saw the “bulldozer assault” of Feb. 24-26, when U.S. soldiers with plows mounted on tanks and bulldozers moved along 10 miles of trenches, burying alive some 1,000 Iraqi soldiers. Or the night of Feb. 26, when allied forces cordoned off a stretch of highway between Kuwait and Basra, Iraq, incinerating tens of thousands of retreating soldiers and civilians, in an incident come to be called the “Highway of Death.”

We saw no coverage of dead Kurds and Shiites who, at Bush’s instigation and expecting his support, rose up against Saddam. Nor in the months and years after, the news of the Iraqi epidemic of birth defects, cancers and systemic disease.

We heard little about the 20,000 troops occupying Saudi Arabia after the war, the growing regional resentment for the destruction and death, injuries and insults of invasion and occupation. We never heard of the Saudi Muslim radical Osama bin Laden, his outraged protests, for which he was banished, wandering the region, recruiting young followers to avenge the desecration of Islam’s sacred sites.

As for our own, there were no images of returning coffins filled with U.S. service members, nor, in the days and months after the war, coverage of the war’s aftermath: The 200,000 troops who returned profoundly ill from Gulf War illness; the trauma, addiction and/or brain damage that caused veterans to kill their wives, family, fellow citizens, and/or themselves; and, of course, on Sept. 11, 2001, the tragic event used by the George W. Bush administration to launch a second war against Iraq.

There was no mainstream media coverage of the roots, just of the proclamations of them versus us, hatemongers versus freedom lovers, barbaric cowards versus civilized heroes.

We could read about bin Laden’s jihad, but little appeared of the fatwa he and his counterparts throughout the Middle-East issued, except the often-quoted statement that it was the duty of every Muslim “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military,” leaving out the second part of the sentence — “in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

Barack Obama’s early opposition to George 43′s Gulf War was a sign of the integrity, knowledge, and depth for which Americans would elect him,  trusting these virtues would guide us in hard times. Patriotic etiquette discourages politicians, especially presidents, from bearing complexities in public forums.

But war-weary, broke and scared Americans will welcome the president breaking rules and speaking awkward truths.

Invasion and violence, like chickens, do come home to roost. We’re ready for a leader who grasps history’s complications and heeds its lessons and who won’t release us from one war only to tie us to another, and another.