Nora Eisenberg

George Herbert Walker Bush and the myth of the 'good' Gulf War

President George Herbert Walker Bush considered the 1991 Gulf War his highest achievement, a signature moment in world history, and for nearly three decades mainstream media have agreed.  On the occasion of his death, they are sticking to the story. The New York Times obituary praised him for the “global coalition” he assembled to “eject Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, sending hundreds of thousands of troops in a triumphant military campaign.”  A Washington Post article on Bush 41’s legacy in the Middle East explains that the World War II fighter pilot “came to view Saddam as similar to Adolf Hitler, a madman who seized neighboring Kuwait and could plunge the world into conflict if he continued into Saudi Arabia.” And thus “Bush rallied together a coalition of nations” to curb the dictator’s power.  Yes, Desert Storm lasted only 43 days with only 148 U.S. fatalities in battle, a third from friendly fire.  But that’s about the only truth in the official history of the late President’s Gulf War. The evidence that has mounted over the years tells a very different story. The Gulf War of Bush the Father was as sinister and destructive as that of his son.

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Here are 10 hard truths about war for Veterans Day - and every other day

Veterans Day, which Americans celebrate on November 11, was originally called Armistice Day, to commemorate the cessation of fighting in the Great War of 1914-1918. In the United States, the idea that this was “the war to end all wars,” (a phrase coined by H.G. Wells in a pamphlet of that name and echoed by Woodrow Wilson with equal earnestness) was challenged by an outspoken and persecuted peace movement, including poor farmers and black Americans conscripted at disproportionate rates.

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Inside America's Dark History of Chemical Warfare

As the Obama administration presses ahead with its mission to punish the Syrian government for its alleged gassing of civilians in suburban Damascus, the particulars of the attack remain unclear. All too clear, though, is the role of the United States as a supplier, supporter and even employer of a wide range of weapons of mass destruction, including sarin gas, resulting in the death and illness of not only those considered our enemies, but our “heroes” too.

The 1960s and 1970s

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Bombshell: Government’s 'Insider Threat Program' Obligates Federal Workers to Spy on Their Colleagues

Once again, the McClatchy company is doing mainstream media’s heavy lifting, exposing the secrets of an increasingly hidden government. In 2003, it was McClatchy alone among the major media groups that questioned the government’s certain claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

On Thursday, the same reporters  involved in the Iraq truth-telling a decade ago exposed the existence of the Obama administration’s program that obligates government workers to spy on their colleagues or face punishment, dismissal, and possibly criminal charges. The Insider Threat Program targets not only national security departments and agencies but most federal bureacracies from the Peace Corps to the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture Departments.

And it’s clear that not only the  disclosure of classified information  constitutes an “internal threat”  and act of espionage, but leaks to the media as well.  “Leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” according to a June 1 Department of Defense planning document for the program, leaked to McClatchy.

The  White House launched the Insider Threat Program’s in October 2011 as it still reeled from the Wikileaks disclosures of hundreds of thousands of documents thought to have been downloaded from classified networks by Private Bradley Manning the year before. The program is evolving, agency to agency, in response to the President’s broad guidelines.  Documents provided by the McClatchy investigation show the varied approaches to the executive mandate. At the DoD, McClatchy reports,  the policy is “zero tolerance”: “Employees must turn themselves and others in for failing to report breaches.”  But it’s the suspicion of potential breaches that must be reported. requiring co-workers to monitor colleagues’ work and lives.   Profiling is encouraged: A co-worker facing a divorce or financial problems is to be watched carefully one training memo states, as these are “indicators” of  an inclination toward espionage.  An extensive Army training document offers hundreds of suspicious behaviors that federal workers must report including working hard and independently: ”repeatedly performing non required work outside of normal duty hours, especially if unaccompanied."

At the Department of Agriculture, “Treason 101” offers an online tutorial in the basics of spying and the Inside Espionage Threat. 
 
The two-year-old program is now expected to be revved up in the wake of   Edward Snowden’s explosive revelation of the National Security Agency’s  telephone and internet data collection programs. But according to internal security experts and former government officials that the McClatchy team interviewed, the Insider Threat Program will have “grave consequences for the public’s right to know.” It could make it easier for the government to inhibit exposure of unclassified information and illegal programs and thwart legitimate whistleblowing. The program will be used to quell different perspectives, which in the end can hurt national security, they fear. Fearfulness and group think contributed to the prevailing and erroneous CIA judgment that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction,  warranting invasion.

Again, it was the McClatchy group that distinguished itself among mainstream media for questioning the  veracity of the claims used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation. And, again,  as the government takes aim at its own citizens as internal threats, it is McClatchy, among the large newspapers and newspaper groups, that keeps the facts coming.

New Study Exposes How Natural Gas Isn't the Clean Fossil Fuel It's Hyped up to Be

This article was published in partnership with GlobalPossibilities.org.

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Major Military Contractor Poisons American Troops, Avoids Accountability

In the spring and summer of 2003, when U.S. troops were guarding cleanup of a neglected water treatment plant in the Basrah oil fields in Qatmat Ali, southern Iraq, they noticed orange dust scattered on the floor and sitting in open sacks. Within weeks, several were suffering nosebleeds, eye irritations, sore throats, and anxiety about the dust's relation to their new maladies.

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Anti-Fracking Protesters Confront Pennsylvania Gov During Kayaking PR Trip on Endangered River

At just after  8 am on Thursday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett got into a blue kayak in Beach Lake, Pa  to begin a 15 mile trip south on the scenic Delaware, the nation's most pristine and ancient river. Some 30 kayakers, friends and associates, including Richard Allan, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Conservation and Natural Resources, on the misty morning, part of a two-day promotion of the region's tourism resources. But from start to finish the trip was beset with challenges.

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Successful Anti-Fracking Organization Damascus Citizens for Sustainability Embarks on New Legal Fight to Save Rivers


The citizen group Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (DCS) has filed a public records request to force the Susquehanna River Basin Comission (SRBC), which includes officials from Pennsylvania, New York State, Maryland and the federal government, to show what, if anything, it has been doing to protect regional waters and the general public from the hydrofracking water demands and pollution.

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Have Public Servants Charged with Protecting Drinking Water for 15 Million People Sold Out to the Gas Drilling Industry?

Over the past decade, 34 states have succumbed to the hazardous and largely unregulated hydraulic fracturing (widely known as "fracking") of deep shale formations to extract natural gas. This radical drilling method, blasting its way from Texas and the Rockies, through Louisiana and Arkansas to the east, has wreaked havoc, turning large swathes of the nation sitting above shale formations into industrial zones, degrading landscapes, economies, land values, air quality, and perhaps most importantly, water.

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Why Is Obama Cuddling Up to Karl Rove and His Gas Drilling Friends?

In the days following Tuesday's election, President Obama's first peace offering to hardliners across the aisle was telling: "We've got, I think, broad agreement that we've got terrific natural gas resources in this country," he said. At the same time he was giving the thumbs-up for natural gas drilling, Karl Rove was doing the same, appearing as the keynote speaker at Pittsburgh's David Lawrence Convention Center for the DUG (Developing Unconventional Gas) East Coast conference on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale.

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Leaked Internal Memo Shows How VA Systematically Screws Over Wounded Vets to Maintain Performance Grades

The Veterans Health Administration systematically delays and denies sick veterans medical care and masks it with bogus documentation. That's what the VA Inspector General and a number of veterans' advocates have been claiming since the early days of the Iraq War, when soldiers returning from Operation Enduring Freedom began flooding VA facilities. Now an internal department memo, posted Wednesday on a watchdog Web site, confirms these charges.

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A New Generation of Natural Gas Drilling Is Endangering Communities From the Rockies to New York

Theater and film director Josh Fox's documentary Gasland explores the new generation of natural gas drilling, which for a decade has been blasting its way east across the country, tapping shale formations from the Rockies to Pennsylvania, and is now expanding in New York. Fox is only 37, but he is a veteran explorer of complex themes from militarism to war to globalization and torture who skillfully blends artistry and social message. Gasland is more straightforward than Fox's earlier experimental mixes of theater, dance, music and film, but no less striking. Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance, where it premiered in January, Gasland has been causing a stir wherever it has gone since. 

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10 Things We Must Remember on Memorial Day

According to Yale historian David Blight, Memorial Day (first called Decoration Day), the U.S. holiday commemorating fallen soldiers, got its start at the end of the Civil War. In 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina former African-American slaves exhumed Union soldiers from a mass grave on the site of Charleston's exclusive racetrack and buried them in individual graves, a ten-day project that ended in a day of celebration of the nation, peace, and freedom in which thousands of Charleston's black families gathered to decorate graves, pray, play games, and picnic. 145 years after the end of our Civil War, our nation is engaged in near civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which we had a part in starting and no plans for ending.

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Could the Largest Oil Drilling Catastrophe Also End up the Largest Natural Gas and Climate Disaster in Recent History?

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.

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KBR Tells Court It Was Following Military Orders When Employees Burned Toxic Waste in Open Pits

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.

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Why the Dark Secrets of the First Gulf War Are Still Haunting Us

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

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The New Gulf War Syndrome

What does a war injury look like? In the case of Iraq, we tend to picture veterans bravely getting on with their lives with the help of steel legs or computerized limbs. Trauma injuries are certainly the most visible of health problems -- the ones that grab our attention. A campaign ad for congressman Tom Udall featured an Iraq war veteran who had survived a shot to his head. Speaking through the computer that now substitutes for his voice, Sergeant Erik Schei extols the top-notch care that saved his life.

As politicians argue about healthcare for veterans, it is generally people like Sgt Schei that they have in mind, men and women torn apart by a bullet or bomb. And of course, these Iraq war veterans must receive the best care available for such complex and catastrophic injuries.

Unfortunately, the dangers of modern war extend far beyond weapons. As Iraqis know only too well, areas of Iraq today are among the most polluted on the planet -- so toxic that merely to live, eat and sleep (never mind to fight) in these zones is to risk death. Thousands of soldiers coming home from the war may have been exposed to chemicals that are known to cause cancers and neurological problems. What's most tragic is that the veterans themselves do not always realize that they are in danger from chemical poisoning. Right now, there is no clear way for Iraq war veterans to find out what they've been exposed to and where to get help.

In October, the Military Times reported on the open-air pits on U.S. bases in Iraq, where troops incinerate tons of waste. Because of such pits, tens of thousands of soldiers may be breathing air contaminated with burning Freon, jet fuel and other carcinogens. According to reports, soldiers are coughing up blood or the black goop that has been nicknamed "plume crud".

In other cases, soldiers may have been exposed to poisons spread during efforts to restore Iraq's infrastructure. In 2003, for instance, members of the Indiana national guard were put in charge of protecting a water-treatment plant. They were told not to worry about the bright orange dust lying in piles around the plant, swirling in the air and gathering in the folds of their uniforms. In fact, Indiana soldiers spent weeks or months in a wasteland contaminated with sodium dichromate. The chemical, made famous after its role as the villain in the movie Erin Brockovich, is used to peel corrosion off of water pipes. It is a carcinogen that attacks the lungs and sinuses.

Today, a decade and a half after the first Gulf war, we know that such exposure may lead to widespread suffering. In 1991, veterans began to exhibit fatigue, fevers, rashes, joint pain, intestinal problems, memory loss, mood swings and even cancers, a cluster of symptoms and conditions referred to now as Gulf war syndrome (or illness). For years, the U.S. department of defense maintained that stress caused the veterans' symptoms. Veterans groups blamed war-related toxins. This year, the National Academy of Sciences published an extensive review of years of scientific study of Gulf war illness that concluded a cause and effect relationship existed between the widespread illnesses among veterans and exposure to powerful neurotoxins. Complementing the U.S. studies is an emerging body of epidemiological data linking increased incidence of Iraqi cancer, birth defects, infant mortality and multi-system diseases to toxic exposure.

Strangely enough, though, there has been almost no discussion of whether today's soldiers -- those fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan -- have also been injured by wartime poisons. We don't have a word yet for the constellation of cancers, psychological ills and systemic diseases that may be caused by toxins in today's wars.

In order to care for our veterans, we must do more than offer state-of-the-art hospitals and high-tech prosthetics. Veterans will need information about what poisons they have breathed or touched or drunk and when.

What would such an effort look like? First the military would need to disclose all known incidents of toxic exposure. Then it would have to reach out to veterans and give them information about how to receive care for conditions that arise from this exposure.

This summer, senator Evan Bayh made a first stab at such a system. Bayh pushed the national guard to track down hundreds of those Indiana soldiers who may have breathed orange dust back in 2003. Most of the soldiers are now civilians scattered across the U.S., unaware that they are at high risk for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. Some of them may already be struggling with illness. The national guard is making an effort to search for these veterans and provide them with a phone number to call in order to seek medical help.

That's a good first step. But what about all the other veterans who believe that they have returned home from the war healthy? Without knowing it, they may be carrying a small bomb inside them. And they have a right to know.

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