Still Conscious

Please forgive me, but I’ve become one of the masses. The countless, nameless, faceless sheep who rise before the sun and go to bed long after it has set all in an inane effort to pay the bills. Why inane? Because expenses increase exponentially with the number of hours you spend working – test it sometime, it’s true! In between exercising [(yep, I get up before 5am for my daily (well, not EVERYday) workout], commuting, working, responding to, deleting, and organizing email, taxiing, parenting, wifing (I wonder if it should be an “f” or a “v”?), cleaning, cooking, grading (a special bonus of teaching is that you have work you get to bring home, like homework when you were a student, FUN), I do occasionally talk shop with friends and family. But the shop talk (how F#@$d up our country and its state of affairs) is so damn depressing!

What fun is it to talk about weapons of mass destruction and whether or not we should go to war? How exciting is it to have a round robin discussion of the evil privacy negating intent of the Patriot Act? Or who setup the outing of dissenting Joe Wilson’s CIA wife? Or how the incompetence of Michael Brown could really hurt the US in case of a natural or unnatural disaster? There’s no fun in being right, there’s no joy in “I told you so,” because no one believes us, even when we’re saturated in evidence. Even as a fulltime everything, I was still very aware of:

• soldiers committing atrocities and getting caught,
• the mounting evidence that the Plame leak ends at Bush’s desk,
• Ken Lay’s final exit and how it dealt another f#@$ you to past Enron employees,
• Congress’ great pause in trying to protect the flag from fire (how about some inexpensive flame retardant?),
• Republicans’ use of immigration to wag the dog – biting them in the ass,
• the Supreme Court protecting the rights of prisoners (like they were real human beings), and
• the US launching a shuttle with astronauts on it for the first time since the 2004 when the Columbia broke apart on reentry.
  

My point? Even as an insanely busy woman, I manage to avoid complete unconsciousness. I haven’t organized the InterAct files as nicely as I'd like, I don’t engage everyone in heated debate, but I do offer extra credit to any student who watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Though you may have drifted off early on with my inescapable bad listing habit, I leave you with a recommendation of excellent reading (or listening, whichever you prefer because I'm all about choice!) – FUBAR.

~ Jodie Hemerda

When it's ok to be bad

The US media has been recycling the same news about Steven D. Green and his actions in Iraq since the allegations first broke. Of interest is how the media frames the crime in ways that excuse and brush off Green's actions:


1. The child was not a child. I know that the Pentagon says the woman Steven D. Green raped, killed and set on fire was 25. However, her uncle says she was 15 and there are reports that she was as young as 14. The Pentagon has declined to address this discrepancy. Where I live, if you are under 18 the law considers you a child. Yet, a Google and Yahoo search shows none (NONE!) of the US media outlets call Abeer Qassim Hamza a child, even when they list her age as under 18. At most they call her a "teen," but usually stick with "young woman." The exception to this is the World Socialist Web Site.

2. The soldier had been (honorably) discharged. We have a man accused of raping and murdering not only a child, but her entire family, and we are unconcerned that he is now back in our suburbs, among our own families? None of these stories comment on the risk he poses to US and his arrest came only after the charges were made public when it was feared he would flee to avoid prosecution.

3. Three of Abeer Qassim Hamza's relatives at home during the rape were also killed. One of those was her 7-year-old sister, but the true horror of this crime is ignored when the press frames the victims in a way that obscure the true nature of Green's actions.

4. No one in his home town remembers the skinny, 21 year-old Marine....keeps the focus on Steven D. Green. By ignoring the rest of the story, how Abeer Qassim Hamza and her family were found (by her 8-year-old brother returning from school) and what the family's struggle has been from that point on, the media prefer to only highlight the details of Green himself, removing the identity and grief of the victims.

5. Just a few rotten apples. This was first seen with the Abu Ghraib prison torture stories. There were at least three other soldiers with Green at the time, but they have yet to be named and their roles are not discussed. It is clear that many other soldiers knew about this and kept quiet until the recent kidnappings and murders of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Pfc. Thomas Tucker who were from the same unit as Green. When a crime this brutal is not memorable enough to tug at the conscious of our soldiers (until they are made targets for it) then it is not solitary.

6. Green was drunk or had been drinking before he took his three buddies to Abeer Qassim Hamza's home to rape and kill her.

7. Green will be tried in the United States. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act allows crimes committed in Iraq by US soldiers to be prosecuted as if they had been committed in the United States. This bypasses the Iraqi courts, the International courts and mitigates the level of seriousness over these actions. This is not just a rape and multiple murder. This is rape and mass murder by a man who is a part of the invasion and occupation force governing Iraq.

8. If found guilty by a US jury who has never been in Iraq, Green will be punished according to our law; a possible death sentence, life in prison a fine of $250,000 or five years supervised release. The Marines and Bush Administration will be left untouched by this.

9. Green planned the murders. Sometimes the various news stations report that Green planned them for a week. But that is all that is made from this. Why this child? Why did he feel he could commit acts of rape, torture and murder in front of his fellow soldiers and get away with it? Almost no mention is made of the fact that Abeer's mother was so worried over her child that on the very day of their murder, she had made plans for Abeer to stay somewhere else for her safety. It is alleged that Abeer came to Green's attention during the checkpoints, so we need to know how common it is for soldiers to decide they are going to abuse the people that pass through the areas set up for Iraqi protection.

10. Green was honorably discharged for an "antisocial personality disorder." Forget the countless 'insanity pleas' that we scoff at on the media. This is a serious thread left uninvestigated. Is it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and if so, what treatment is he receiving? If he had it when he enlisted, who knew and what is their responsibility in this? How many other soldiers like Green are in Iraq, armed and blanketed by impunity?

The lesson given as this story with so little insight or variation is repeated by the media is that it's ok to be bad when the person you abuse means nothing. Some people have called this the My Lai of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In a situation where an uninvited nation invades and takes over a country using a doctrine of racism and elitism, where soldiers have no protection or training to handle an insurgency, where tours are extended and stop-loss enacted, where the economic and physical living situation of the country deteriorates -- I call it just another day in Iraq.

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/

Look Into the Crystal Ball

When the United States invaded Afghanistan to rid them of the Taliban one of the first actions undertaken to provide security was the collection of weapons. As CNN military analyst General Don Shepperd so eloquently explained December 23, 2001;

“Well, basically, the whole idea is just collect [the weapons] in a pile and then sort them out later. But then you got to guard the pile. And the whole idea behind this, of course, is to get this country disarmed and then to take these weapons and turn them over to a new Afghan police force and also, an Afghan military. It is a daunting task. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands of weapons and ammunitions spread all across that country. So again, the basic idea is you collect it, collect it in a pile, store it, protect it, and then sort it out later for the military and the police that follow.”

And so we have spent the last five years trying to scrounge up every weapon (or better yet, weapon cache) we could find. This worked a lot better for us than rounding up suspected members of al Qaeda, as it is pretty easy to tell if an AK-47 is a gun or not, but not so easy to tell if a farmer is a terrorist or not.

But, with the "surprising" resurgence of Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, we had to find another method of controlling the country, or at least Kabul. After all, these fighters (who never completely disappeared) were now using techniques perfected by the insurgency in Iraq.

So, the government created by the best democracy on earth had this brilliant solution; re-arm the warlords they’ve spent 5 years trying to disarm. Brilliant!

But…does that mean in two years we will be handing out WMD’s on the streets of Baghdad to fight the insurgency?

~Lila Schow
Because Responsible Citizens Clean Up After Their Government
http://goodusgov.org/