Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
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The war criminals, Bush,Cheney,Rice,Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell and Blair from England
How many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago? Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again.
The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in our country as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime.
Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of a mostly amnesiac citizenry.
We condemned children to death, some after many days of writhing in pain on bloodstained mats, without pain relievers. Some died quickly, wasted by missing arms and legs, crushed heads. As the fluids ran out of their bodies, they appeared like withered, spoiled fruits. They could have lived, certainly should have lived – and laughed and danced, and run and played- but instead they were brutally murdered. Yes, murdered!
The war ended for those children, but it has never ended for survivors who carry memories of them. Likewise, the effects of the U.S. bombings continue, immeasurably and indefensibly.
The McGlynn
Iraq A Deadly Deception – War Documentary 2018
WAR DOCUMENTARY: IRAQ A DEADLY DECEPTION ALJAZEERA DOCUMENTARIES
On the evening of 9/11, George W Bush made a vow to the American public – that he would defeat terrorism. Unknown to those listening in shock to the presidential address, the president and his advisers had already begun planning their trajectory into an invasion of Iraq. It was packaged as “holding responsible the states who support terrorism” by Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser between 2001 and 2003.
“I believe it represented a recognition that we would never succeed against the terrorists if we went after them one at a time and as long as governments were facilitating the organisation, training, equipping of, financing of terrorist organisations, we were never going to get it under control,” says Perle. After 100 days spent fighting those who had become publicly accepted as the culprits – Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan – the US set the ball rolling for war against Iraq.
On the evening of 9/11 the president is saying: well, maybe we’ll be going after Iraq now and somebody said, well, that would be against international law. The president responded: I don’t care, we’re going to kick some ass.
How the Obama administration watched the demise of Arab democracy — and paved the way for Trump’s embrace of dictators.
President Trump boasts that he has reversed American policies across the Middle East. Where his predecessor hoped to win hearts and minds, Mr. Trump champions the axiom that brute force is the only response to extremism — whether in Iran, Syria, Yemen or the Palestinian territories. He has embraced the hawks of the region, in Israel and the Persian Gulf, as his chief guides and allies.
But in many ways, this hard-line approach began to take hold under President Barack Obama, when those same regional allies backed the 2013 military ouster of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That coup was a watershed moment for the region, snuffing out dreams of democracy while emboldening both autocrats and jihadists. And American policy pivoted, too, empowering those inside the administration “who say you just have to crush these guys,” said Andrew Miller, who oversaw Egypt for the National Security Council under Mr. Obama, and who is now with the Project on Middle East Democracy. Some of the coup’s most vocal American advocates went on to top roles in the Trump administration, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser.
I was The New York Times Cairo bureau chief at the time of the coup, and I returned to the events years later in part to better understand Washington’s role. I learned that the Obama administration’s support for the Arab Spring uprisings had been hobbled from the start by internal disagreements over the same issues that now define Trump policy — about the nature of the threat from political Islam, about fidelity to autocratic allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and about the difficulty of achieving democratic change in Egypt and the region.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United Nations has verified that more than 7,000 children have lost their lives or been injured in the Syrian conflict since 2013 — and cites unverified reports putting the number “way beyond 20,000,” a U.N. envoy said Friday.
Virginia Gamba, the special representative for children in conflict, told the Security Council that since the beginning of 2018, the U.N. has verified over 1,200 violations against children. These include more than 600 children killed or maimed and over 180 recruited or used by government forces or armed groups, she said.
“Children continue to be disproportionately affected by the armed conflict in Syria,” Gamba said. “The violence Syrian children have been subjected to — and still are — as well as the pain they and their families have faced throughout these years of ‘crisis’ is simply unacceptable.”
Compared to the last quarter of 2017, Gamba said the first quarter of 2018 saw a 348 percent increase in killing and maiming of children, a 25 percent increase in recruitment and military use of children, and a 109 percent increase in overall grave violations against youngsters.
“The indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks by all parties, of which the latest tally is 88, including the use of weapons prohibited under international law, aerial attacks, mortars and rockets, indiscriminate shelling and improvised explosive devices, have been used against civilian areas and civilian infrastructures and have had a deadly toll on children,” she said.
Gamba said reports attribute most killings and injuries in 2018 to Syrian government and pro-government forces, and all recruitment and military use of children to armed groups.
Although figures for the beginning of 2018 include few verified cases of sexual violence and abduction, Gamba said these violations have been reported since 2013. As examples, she cited sexual abuse and exploitation of boys and girls, the sale of children as sexual slaves, rape as a means of torture, and forcible marriage to fighters from the Islamic State extremist group.
Gamba said the detention of children for alleged association with armed forces and groups “has exponentially increased.”
In 2018 alone, she said over 1,300 children are reportedly being held by parties in northeastern Syria though the U.N. has only been able to verify seven cases because of inaccessibility to the area. Since 2014, she said the U.N. Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism authorized by the Security Council has verified more than 350 cases of detention.
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Hundreds of Syrian refugees returned to their country from Lebanon on Saturday in a bus convoy arranged by both governments, advancing an effort by Beirut to accelerate returns to areas where fighting has ended.
AP Photos
Syrian state television reported that about 1,200 refugees were expected to cross back into the country from Lebanon on Saturday before returning to their homes.
Lebanon’s security chief Abbas Ibrahim said “the coming period will witness the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Lebanon” in comments reported by Hezbollah’s al-Manar television channel.
State television in Syria and the private al-Jadeed channel in Lebanon showed buses full of refugees at the crossing point on the frontier. It is the latest in a series of recent returns arranged by the two countries.
Lebanon hosts more than a million Syrian refugees, more than a quarter of its population, and leading Lebanese politicians have said many of them should go home as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has restored his rule across much of the country.
This week a senior official from Assad’s ally Russia was in Beirut to discuss a plan for mass returns of refugees and its defense ministry said over 1.7 million would be able to return to Syria from abroad in the near future. [nL5N1UK5I4]
The United Nations says that conditions for returns to Syria are not yet fulfilled, more than seven years into a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and driven more than half the pre-war population from their homes.
BEIRUT (Reuters) – A Syrian Kurdish group said on Saturday it had decided with the government to “chart a roadmap to a democratic and decentralized Syria”, but there was no immediate confirmation from Damascus.
Relations between the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad and the Kurdish-led administration in the northeast, the two sides that hold the most territory in Syria, have been pivotal in the course of the seven-year-old civil war.
However, while they have mostly avoided direct conflict, they have articulated sharply opposing visions for the future, with the Kurds seeking autonomy in a decentralized state, and Damascus wanting to restore full central control.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) said it and the government had decided to “form committees on various levels” to develop negotiations, end the violence engulfing Syria and chart a roadmap to democracy and decentralization.
It said it met Syrian government officials in Damascus this week at Assad’s invitation after initial meetings in Tabqa on the Euphrates river that focused on restoring local services.
The SDC is the political wing of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which gained control of the quarter of Syria east of the Euphrates, an area that includes farmland and oil and water resources, during the fight against Islamic State.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi sacked five local election officials on Saturday on charges of corruption during the May 12 parliamentary election, a spokesman for the Independent High Elections Commission (IHEC) said.
The move comes as Iraq conducts a manual recount of the ballots – a move likely to speed up the ratification of the final result and the formation of a new government.
Abadi had appointed a special committee to investigate claims of vote-rigging in several regions, and on Saturday he approved its recommendation to dismiss local election chiefs in Kirkuk, Anbar and Salahuddin, Judge Laith Jabr Hamza said in a statement.
Those in charge of overseas election offices in Turkey and Jordan were also dismissed.
“The decision to sack the officials was approved by the prime minister after they committed violations, manipulation and financial corruption,” said Judge Laith Jabr.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — At least three people were killed after a suicide bomber detonated his explosives vest, paving the way for another attacker to charge into a training center for midwives in the capital of Nangarhar province, a provincial official said on Saturday.
Attahullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor, said the three victims, two security guards and a driver, were killed in the first attack near the center’s gate.
He added that seven others, including three security forces, two civilians and two government employees, were wounded in the attack in Jalalabad city, the capital of the eastern Nangarhar province.
It was not immediately clear how many people sustained wounds from the shooting by the attacker inside the building and how many from the bomb, but an investigation is underway, added Khogyani.
The second attacker was not able to detonate his explosives vest and was shot by security forces.
“More than 60 students, teachers and other employees were rescued form the building by the Afghan security forces,” said Khogyani.
The battle between the attacker and security forces lasted almost six hours, added Khogyani, because “the forces had to rescue every individual from the building,”
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but both Taliban insurgents and fighters from the local affiliate of the Islamic State group are active in eastern Afghanistan, especially in Nangarhar.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is urging American-backed Afghan troops to retreat from sparsely populated areas of the country, officials said, all but ensuring the Taliban will remain in control of vast stretches of the country.
The approach is outlined in a previously undisclosed part of the war strategy that President Trump announced last year, according to three officials who described the documents to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity. It is meant to protect military forces from attacks at isolated and vulnerable outposts, and focuses on protecting cities such as Kabul, the capital, and other population centers.
The withdrawal resembles strategies embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations that have started and stuttered over the nearly 17-year war. It will effectively ensure that the Taliban and other insurgent groups will hold on to territory that they have already seized, leaving the government in Kabul to safeguard the capital and cities such as Kandahar, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad.
The retreat to the cities is a searing acknowledgment that the American-installed government in Afghanistan remains unable to lead and protect the country’s sprawling rural population. Over the years, as waves of American and NATO troops have come and left in repeated cycles, the government has slowly retrenched and ceded chunks of territory to the Taliban, cleaving Afghanistan into disparate parts and ensuring a conflict with no end in sight……..Hundreds of Afghan troops are being killed and wounded nearly every week — many in Taliban attacks on isolated checkpoints. Over the last year alone, the number of Afghan soldiers, police, pilots and other security forces dropped by about 5 percent, or 18,000 fewer people, according to the inspector general’s office.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of an airman who was supporting Operation Inherent Resolve.
Staff Sgt. James T. Grotjan, 26, of Waterford, Connecticut, died July 12 at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, from injuries sustained in a non-combat related incident July 8 at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates.
He was assigned to the 4th Civil Engineer Squadron at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.
Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Andrew Celiz, 32, from Summerville, South Carolina, died, July 12, in Afghanistan, of wounds sustained as a result of enemy small arms fire while conducting operations in support of a medical evacuation landing zone in Zurmat district, Paktiya province. The incident is under investigation.
Celiz was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.
Cpl. Joseph Maciel of South Gate, California, died July 7, 2018, in Tarin Kowt District, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan from wounds sustained during an apparent insider attack. The incident is under investigation.
Maciel was assigned to 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Benning, Georgia. Task Force 1-28 Infantry is currently deployed in support of the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade.
All VA Medical Centers provide PTSD care, as well as many VA clinics.Some VA’s have programs specializing in PTSD treatment. Use the VA PTSD ProgramLocator to find a PTSD program.If you are a war Veteran, find a Vet Center to help with the transition from military to civilian life.
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