11 Years On, Bearing Witness to Iraq War's Lasting Harm

[G_j]

Last edited Thu Mar 27, 2014, 08:37 PM - Edit history (3)

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/03/27-0
Published on Thursday, March 27, 2014 by Common Dreams

#RightToHeal: 11 Years On, Bearing Witness to Iraq War's Lasting Harm

Iraqi civil society organizers and US military veterans launch People's Hearing on occupation's ongoing toxic legacy

- Sarah Lazare, staff writer


<snip>

Toxic Legacy

Speakers described a country poisoned for decades by the U.S. military — from depleted uranium used in the 1991 Gulf War and recent Iraq War, the chemical weapon white phosphorous used in the 2004 U.S. attack on Fallujah, and burn pits — which are run by the U.S. military and private contractors and burn munitions, chemicals, rubbers, plastics, and a host of other substances often within close proximity of Iraqi civilians. The toxic legacy in Iraq was repeatedly compared to the U.S. nuclear legacy in Japan and Agent Orange attacks in Vietnam.Falah Alwan, President of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (Photo: Cara Solomon)

Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist, testified that U.S. burn pits in Iraq are exposing the Iraqi public to a litany of dangerous compounds, including lead and mercury. Research teams sent to Iraqi hospitals in Basra and Falluja found abnormally high rates of cancer, birth defects, and heart defects, she stated.

Kristi Casteel, mother of IVAW member Joshua Casteel, explained that her son passed away August 25, 2012 due to what she believes were complications from cancer caused by exposure to burn pits in Abu Ghraib during his Army service. "Had we known he was at risk from toxins in Iraq, he might have been saved," said Kristi, adding, "The military was "allowing more harm to our soldiers than our supposed enemies were inflicting." Joshua became a conscientious objector, writer, and anti-war activist, and according to his mother, had the dying wish that burn pits be eradicated and those exposed to these pits, especially Iraqis, receive care.

Mohammed, who fled Iraq during the first Gulf war but then returned after 2003 to "help people," described epidemics of birth defects in cities and towns across Iraq. "There are some mothers who have three or four children who don't have limbs that work, who are totally paralyzed, their fingers fused to each other. These children have mental disabilities," she said. "There needs to be reparations for families facing birth defect and areas that have been contaminated. There needs to be cleanup."

U.S.-Backed Repression

Speakers testified that the U.S. has also left behind another poison — the Nouri al-Maliki regime that is stoking sectarian conflict and repressing protesters and organizers fighting for their rights — against the backdrop of health problems, trauma, and a climbing refugee crisis.


..more..

more about the suffering of the people:

links within:

http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/

Welcome

Conventional wisdom in American politics focuses only on American costs in the war in Iraq: the casualties to U.S. soldiers, the financial costs, and sometimes the strategic costs. But the human cost to the Iraqis themselves are nearly ignored in political discourse, the news media, and intellectual circles. This site is a corrective to those oversights. We present empirical reports, studies, and other accounts that convey and assess the consequences of war for the people of Iraq.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Looking Back on Ten Years of War, Trauma, Death, & Displacement



Major studies of war mortality

Three major studies of war mortality have been done in Iraq. Two appeared in The Lancet, the British medical journal, and one appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. They bear strong similarities in their findings, but have some important differences, too.

The first household survey that appeared was published in The Lancet in October 2004, measuring the war-related mortality in the war's first 18 months. The researchers--mainly epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and medical personnel in Iraq--estimated 98,000 "excess deaths" due to war. Read


The second household survey, conducted by the Hopkins scientists again, was completed in June 2006 and published four months later in The Lancet. Its findings: 650,000 people (civilians and fighters) died as a result of the war in Iraq. Read

Another household survey, this one conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health at the same time as the second Hopkins study, found 400,000 excess deaths, 151,000 by violence. As is the case with most such surveys conducted during time of war, there were problems in data gathering and the analysis tended to minimize violent death estimates. But the survey generally confirmed the very high mortality reported in The Lancet. Read

It should be noted that both the second Lancet article and the New England Journal of Medicine article were based on studies that were completed at the height of war-related violence in Iraq. Large-scale fighting continued for another year and slowly subsided for a year after that to lower but continuing levels. So their estimates are a fraction of the total caused by the war.

In 2008, the peer-reviewed journal, Conflict and Health, published "Iraq War Mortality Estimates: A Systematic Review," and found that the household survey method was superior to other forms of counting.

Other Estimates

Several other attempts have been made to estimate the war dead, and particularly civilians killed by violence. Iraq Body Count is the most well known. It counted individuals reported in English-language newspapers, mainly, which severely limited its scope. Similarly, the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index and the U.N. office in Iraq used "passive surveillance" methods (reports from morgues as well as newspapers). The problem with these methods is that they only capture part of the total picture (as with mrgue statistics), their "surveillance instrument" (i.e., newspapers) change over time, and so on. (See the discussion of methods in the Conflict and Health article cited above.) They are mainly useful for viewing trends. Wikileaks also released U.S. military data in 2010, but this was also quite partial--reports from U.S. military personnel.

In 2013, a group of scholars at Columbia University's School of Public Health published a comparison of the Wikileaks and Iraq Body Count estimates, and found a small percentage of single reported deaths overlapping--indicating that the total dead was significantly higher than either estimate held.

Displacement: Refugees and internally displaced

The number of displaced persons, both internal (within Iraq) and external (refugees, mainly in Jordan and Syria) ranged from estimates of 3.5 million to 5 million or more, which were directly attributable to the war. Virtually all first-hand accounts blamed violence as the cause of moving, or threats of ethnic or sectarian cleansing of neighborhoods.

The ravages of displacement, which remains at about 3 million, are bad enough. But it is also another indicator of the scale of mortality. All wars since 1945 have ratios of displaced to fatalities of 10:1 or less, typically more in the range of 5:1. If this typical ratio holds for the Iraq War, that indicates mortality of about one million Iraqis.

- Maps of displacement inside Iraq (up to 2011)

- According UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, the total number of internally displaced equals more than 1.3 million, and the number of refugees exceeds 1.4 million. Total "persons of concern" exceed 3 million. UNHCR web site

- Analysis of internally displaced crisis by International Rescue Committee, a major NGO (March 2013)

- An assessment of IDP situation by the Middle East Institute (Oct 2012)

- Iraqi Refugee Stories - first-hand accounts (video)

- Analysis and advocacy on Iraqi refugees from Human Rights First



Health Effects of War

Health-related impacts on children in Iraq, from the Brussels Tribunal and Global Research, Canada, dewscribes the broad effects on children, including birth defects, cancer, denial of rights, etc. (February 2013).

Environmental Contaminants from War Remnants in Iraq, a well-documented 2011 report that focuses mainly on depleted uranium and its carcinogenic qualities

"Effects of the War on Nutrition and Health...in Children," measured effects empirically in the mot violent areas (2009) and found profound impacts on children's health.

Birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq, rise markedly, says a 2011 medical study. Fallujah, the largest city in Anbar province, was the scene of two enormous battles between US forces and "insurgents."

Metal contamination: "Within less than a decade, the occurrence of congenital birth defects increased by an astonishing 17-fold in the same hospital." Medical study, 2012.



PREVIOUS NEWS & COMMENT

End of U.S. troops occasions minor reflection on war & destruction

The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq has spurred little new information on the scale of destruction in the 8 year, 8 month war. Professor Juan Cole had this to say:


The American public still for the most part has no idea what the United States did to that country, and until we Americans take responsibility for the harm we do others with our perpetual wars, we can never recover from our war sickness, which drives us to resort to violence in international affairs in a way no other democracy routinely does.

Population of Iraq: 30 million.

Number of Iraqis killed in attacks in November 2011: 187

Average monthly civilian deaths in Afghanistan War, first half of 2011: 243

Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17

Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50

Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.

Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.

Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.

Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.

Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.

Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million

Internally displaced [pdf] persons in Iraq: 1.3 million

Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8

Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


COMMENT: From the Canadian International Council website, John Tirman, wrote (Dec. 16, 2011):

War has a powerful impact on those who have lived through one, bending every calculation, every thought, every action to the possible consequences of violence, deprivation, displacement and the other ravages of conflict. Oddly, war has become a distant occurrence for most of us in the industrialized West. The armed forces of Canada and the United States are all-volunteer and have been for many years, so very few who are unwilling to go to war or work in war zones are actually forced to experience its maelstrom.

But the people who live in war zones do, of course. Many millions of them are directly affected by the violence, now for more than a decade in Afghanistan in its latest war and for nearly nine years in Iraq in a war that followed 12 years of crippling sanctions and the short but intense Operation Desert Storm.

And there’s the rub: war devastates these places, but to us they are remote and largely forgettable. The amount of public attention to Afghanistan and Iraq has declined steadily. We scarcely pay attention to what has happened to the native populations. There are, perhaps, political and psychological reasons for this indifference—a turning away from the violence, a mission gone bad, falsehoods proffered by politicians, and many others. But the indifference is unmistakable. The news media rarely describes the ruinous consequences of U.S. policy and war-making for Afghanis and Iraqis. Few, if any, novels, films or other cultural expressions attempt to capture this suffering either.

This broad tendency to forget, or intentionally put aside, the ravages of war was evident during and after the Korean War (1950-53) and the Indochina wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and early ’70s. But we forget at our peril. We should care about what happens to these people and their societies, not only for moral reasons, but also because forgetting has consequences.

Counting the Dead

One symptom of this indifference is the absence of an adequate accounting of the wars’ destruction, particularly of war mortality. The governments don’t discuss it, and the news media reliably report the lowest conceivable numbers—“tens of thousands” is the usual formulation for Iraq – or the partial numbers collated by the U.N. office in Kabul for Afghanistan. In fact, the numbers of fatalities are significantly higher and need to be studied for their implications.

In Iraq, some brave attempts to collect and analyze data about war-related mortality have at least given us a sense of the scale of mayhem. Several household surveys, the state-of-the-art method favored by epidemiologists, indicate a death toll reaching well into the hundreds of thousands. (This includes all Iraqis, not just civilians, from direct violence and indirectly due to other factors – so-called excess deaths above the pre-war mortality rate.) Even the oft-cited tally of Iraq Body Count, a U.K.-based NGO, holds that more than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of violence. IBC’s method is crude and incomplete—it gathers data mainly from English-language newspapers—and they acknowledge an undercount by at least a factor of two. The lowest estimate of all the household surveys—a large, randomized sample conducted by the Ministry of Health in the spring of 2006—was 400,000 excess deaths in the 2003-2006 period, and there was still a lot of killing to come. By using data on widows, displaced persons (up to 5 million), and the household surveys, I estimate the number of war-related dead to be at least 600,000 and possibly as much as one million.

This is not a number that most American politicians want to consider. What’s more puzzling is the reaction of the news media, which have generally failed to report on the war’s destruction. Even as the U.S. military exits Iraq, the news media’s treatment focuses on American soldiers returning home or questions the future stability of Iraq in the absence of U.S. troops. There is very little on how the war has affected ordinary Iraqis.

On Afghanistan, a far less violent conflict compared with Iraq, we have even less information. The U.N. office gathers data from morgues, the military and news reports, but this “passive surveillance” captures only a fraction of the war dead and cannot explain what is being missed. No household surveys have been conducted in Afghanistan. So we have only the sketchiest notions of the war’s human toll. (This was also true of the wars in Korea and Indochina, where estimates are largely guesswork.) Overall, my best estimate of excess deaths in Afghanistan is around 100,000, but it is an inadequate estimate, as all are for this beleaguered country.

The Illusion of Validity

The low numbers the news media and political leaders use to describe the outcome of these wars provide an unintentional symmetry to the conflicts: the conflicts began under an illusion of validity, to borrow a phrase from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, which in Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s purported “weapons of mass destruction” and in Afghanistan was the purported hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Now the wars wind down under another illusion of validity, which is that the civilians harmed by the wars are relatively few. This is repeated so often, sometimes with reference to the Iraq Body Count or UN numbers, however hollow their credibility, that absurdly low estimates have become conventional wisdom. It is so much so that even the liberal media, like National Public Radio or the New York Times, rarely explore the human costs of the war to Iraqis or Afghanis.

These illusions, which feed indifference, have consequences. Others in the Muslim world particularly notice this callousness. It does not reflect well on America that many believe it to be a reckless bully unmindful of the havoc it wreaked, nor on Britain and Canada that they are camp followers of this recklessness.

The consequences for the United States are even more dramatic if considering the domestic political scene. By ignoring or forgetting the sheer destructiveness of the wars, Americans can continue on a path of seeing all foreign problems as fixable with military force. (Nowadays some domestic issues are regarded in the same light, with one result being the enormous homeland security apparatus.) This has been the tragic tendency of U.S. policy makers since 1945. The president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said of previous armed ventures, war above all nourishes the presidency. If there is no accountability for the human toll of war, the urge to deploy military assets will remain powerful.

Colin Powell famously said that invading a country means following the Pottery Barn rule, “If you break it, you own it.” The sad fact is that we broke Iraq and may be breaking Afghanistan, but we don’t “own it.” We scarcely recall that we ever had anything to do with it. As the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the season of forgetting is upon us.

Widows in Iraq indicate scale of killing during U.S. war

The New York Times published a story in late November 2011 about widows' hardship in Iraq, a rare instance of of an account of how the war has affected ordinary people in Iraq. The reporter states that 86,000 war widows are getting assistance from the Iraqi government, and that this "corresponds with conservative estimates of 103,000 to 113,000 Iraqi deaths in the war."
This supposition is typical of the news media nowadays, which regularly reports the lowest estimates for war mortality. Consider the 86,000 figure supporting the 103-113,000 death toll. Half of the men in Iraq are not married. A very large number of men who are killed in the violence are young, far less than the average age of first marriage, which is 25 years old in Iraq. Many children are killed or die unnecessarily due to poor health care conditions. Women also die in war; approximately 10% of violent deaths were women.
Not all war widows are getting benefits, moreover. As this earlier and more complete report from Reuters details, "Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork. One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost. She gave up." The 2009 law to compensate widows was only put into effect last summer, so the numbers of women who have not even been registered is unknown and possibly very large.
This one metric, then--numbers of war widows, estimated to be 2 million for all wars--indicates a minimum of 250,000 deaths due to the war, not 100,000. Given that we do not know how many women will claim benefits, the actual figure is likely two to three times that. (Nov. 28)

Reports on displaced paint grim picture of poverty and status

Recent reports on Iraqis displaced by war show a chronic disaster. In a Brookings-LSE account, for example, scholar Elizabeth Ferris writes: "The governments of the region have generally allowed them to remain but haven’t recognized them as refugees nor given them formal residency rights. Not yet persuaded that it’s safe to return to their country, they live in limbo." UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, noted in a July report that "an estimated 1.3 million IDPs are in Iraq. 467,565 IDPs and destitute persons reside in 382 settlements countrywide. The conditions in the settlements are extremely poor." Only one in eight of Iraqi displaced persons has returned to their homes since the violence subsided in 2008, says the agency. One reason for the trickle of returnees may be the Iraqi economy: Another U.N. agency says that more than half of all Iraqis live in “slum conditions,” compared with 17 percent in 2000. (Sept. 30)

..much more...

[Mnemosyne]

1. Does no one care anymore what our country did to the Iraqi people? I am

appalled and disgusted that POTUS is trying to help re-write US war crimes.

And Will takes a beating...

[G_j]

3. I share your dismay nt

[Mnemosyne]

34. Thanks for that, G_J, feels lonely sometimes doesn't it? nt

[G_j]

35. it does

thank you

[Octafish]

16. Since 1991, when Poppy Doc Bush lied America into war on Iraq.

Annals of Government - (How the US Armed Iraq)

In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission

By Murray Waas and Craig Unger
The New Yorker Magazine - Originally published November 2, 1992
Posted to the web November 14, 2002

Introduction

This article, originally published in New Yorker Magazine, provides a clear picture of the direct involvement of the United States in arming Iraq, providing Saddam Hussein with technology, weapons, intelligence and funding - even in contravention of American law - enabling Iraq to amass the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons that threaten the world. While the US does not openly acknowledge its role in arming Iraq, it now prepares to go to war against a monster of its own creation...

Since this article provides an excellent in-depth analysis of the US's dysfunctional Middle East policy dating back to the administrations of Presidents Reagan and Bush, it also provides the best perspective from which to view the Pollard case. As long as the US acknowledges no responsibility for its role in arming Iraq, Jonathan Pollard will continue to be buried alive in prison by successive American administrations fearing exposure and embarrassment.

***

In late July, 1986, William J. Casey, then the Director of Central Intelligence, sat down with George Bush, then the Vice-President of the United States, in an out-of-the-way study that Casey maintained on the third floor of the old Executive Office Building, the rococo structure adjoining the White House. Casey had something he wanted Bush to do.

For many years, both Bush and Casey had moved easily in the worlds of foreign policy and Republican politics, and Bush had once held Casey's job. But their relationship was never entirely comfortable. Casey, gruff and perpetually disheveled, was the product of public and parochial schools in Queens and on Long Island - his father was a Tammany Hall pension bureaucrat - and of Fordham. Bush, elaborately friendly in manner, was the offspring of Connecticut gentry. Like his father, an investment banker who served in the Senate, Bush attended Yale and was tapped for Skull and Bones. Casey made millions on his own as a stock speculator; Bush, with family help, grew moderately prosperous in the oil business before his political rise in Houston. Both men held high posts under Richard Nixon, but Nixon himself treated Casey as an equal and Bush condescendingly. It was under Gerald Ford that Bush was appointed to the job Casey now held.

The two men were different in more than background. Casey was part of the rising conservative movement, the historic antagonist of Bush and his ancestors within the Republican Party. In the Cold War, Casey believed not in containment but in what in the late forties and early fifties had been called rollback. He saw every stirring in every corner of the world through an unchanging ideological prism. Bush, by contrast, was a consummate pragmatist. As Casey knew, Bush was capable of rapidly adopting new positions if expediency or advancement seemed to demand it. He had done so on the issue of recognizing China under Nixon, and he had done so on abortion and on economic policy when he became Ronald Reagan's running mate. According to someone who knew both men, Casey had originally distrusted Bush's lack of conviction. Lately, however, he had begun to see Bush's pragmatism in a new light. Whatever vision the Vice-President might lack, he was a man of immense personal discipline, and he understood accommodation as a way to achieve goals. Moreover, during his service as permanent representative to the United Nations, as chief of the United States liaison office in China, and as director of the C.I.A., he had mastered the arts of compartmentalization and secrecy. "Casey knew there was nobody in government who could keep a secret better," a former high-level C.I.A. official who worked with Casey has told us. "He knew that Bush was someone who could keep his confidence and be trusted. Bush had the same capacity as Casey to receive a briefing and give no hint that he was in the know."

Now, in 1986, Casey, seventy-three years old and suffering from prostate cancer, said he needed Bush to run a covert errand. Iran was proving recalcitrant in secret negotiations to exchange arms for hostages who were being held in Beirut by terrorists with links to Iran, so Casey had dreamed up a scheme for forcing Iran's hand. It requires someone of authority to convey a message to Iran's enemy Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, indirectly and without leaving fingerprints. Vice-President Bush was the ideal courier. He was about to visit the capitals of countries in the Middle East in order to "advance the peace process" between Israelis and Arabs, as he told the New York Times. But if he accepted Casey's assignment he would also be there to advance the war process; that is, to heat up the war between Iran and Iraq, with an incendiary message from Washington to Baghdad - escalate the air war and escalate the bombing deep inside Iranian territory.

Casey's reasoning was that if Saddam Hussein could be induced to order his fastidiously cautious Air Force to attack Iran in strength, Iran would be forced to turn anew to the United States for missiles and other weapons of air defense. The United States would then use its enhanced leverage to get better terms from the Iranians for the release of the hostages. (Casey may have been particularly concerned about the plight of one of the hostages, the Lebanon C.I.A. station chief William A. Buckley.) And for Casey there was another enticement as well, according to two Reagan Administration officials whom he frequently confided in; by bringing off this scheme, he would be manipulating two rival policy factions in the Administration.

CONTINUED...

http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/111402.htm



Empires Need Extractors

[G_j]

28. +100

Last edited Sat Mar 29, 2014, 03:57 AM - Edit history (1)

I was protesting in DC over Poppy's war. In those days we would get threatened by skin heads and such, in DC, Vietnam vets formed a line protecting the demonstrators, not a popular war to oppose.

[Mnemosyne]

33. I shudder when I read people on DU claim that Poppy was a half-way "decent" guy.

I seriously doubt these creatures can ever be brought to their knees.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[JaneyVee]

4. Thank God Obama ended that travesty.

[G_j]

5. it ain't really over for the Iraqi people. nt

[JackRiddler]

6. The travesty is not over...

only now it's the Iraqis living with the horror, all on their own.

And the U.S. military involvement continued under the Obama administration right up until the deadline in the SOFA reached under Bush, with a failed attempt to extend the U.S. presence past that date.

Hardly "ending the travesty," when the withdrawal was already scheduled in the treaty.

What about reparations? What about helping Iraqis to recover? What about the hundreds of thousands who have not returned home? What about letting them immigrate here? They live in ethnically cleansed enclaves, under a virtual dictatorship, with continuing high levels of violence - this is the U.S. legacy.

[joshcryer]

8. Bush ended his own war!

Obama had nothing to do with it!

[JackRiddler]

10. Why would you say something so ridiculous?

I certainly didn't.

It's merely correct to say that the aggressors, having failed in many of their objectives and facing protracted resistance in Iraq as well as unpopularity at home, agreed to a withdrawal, which the successor administration then implemented as scheduled in the SOFA. It's also correct that Obama attempted to negotiate an extension of the U.S. military presence, which foundered on the Iraqi refusal of the U.S. demand for immunity from criminal prosecution in Iraq. No U.S. politician should be held up as the hero after that, not even Obama whom you seem to want to worship, and on whose behalf you would revise the history everyone can easily access.

[joshcryer]

12. You say Bush's SOFA = got us out of Iraq.

Obama's consistent claim was that he would "responsibly withdraw" from Iraq. He was the nominee before SOFA was signed and was informed of those national security issues. Meaning "getting out of Iraq" was the easiest commitment he ever made during those elections. He could fulfill it without doing anything.

As far as extending SOFA with training troops, sure, that's the "responsibly" part, but he didn't force the issue by any means. He could've dangled billions in aid. He could've used the 2009 bombings as leverage and forced its extension then. With absolute certainty that's what McCain would've done. But nope, he simply offered to leave training troops and then when the offer was declined we get shit about how Bush ended his own war in Iraq.

[G_j]

9. I know that some things can never be fixed, once broken

and that is certainly true with war. However, in reality, as Colin Powell might say, we still "own it", an imeasuarble amount of violence, trauma and suffering.

[ProSense]

17. The U.S. needs to increase foreign aid to Iraq, agree? n/t

[G_j]

18. from the link,

Justice and Reparations

Speaker after speaker repeated the call for reparations and accountability for a war that, according to some estimates, has killed over one million Iraqi people. Reparations include research into the toxic legacy of the U.S. war in Iraq, and a "clean-up" of these sites. While the Iraqi government is corrupt, there is a civil society that can oversee reparations and move it to the right places, urged Mohammed. Veterans repeated the "Right to Heal" call for true care for returning veterans, and Savabieasfahani also spoke about the need to combat U.S. racism against Arabs and people of color more broadly.

Yet, speakers urged that the real solution is ending the U.S.-led wars responsible for creating the trauma and devastation in the first place.

"The war brings us here today," said Pam Spees, senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an address delivered in Arabic for the Iraqi audience — including those remotely watching a live-stream of the event. "There is nothing that can compensate for the damage that this war has caused, but we are committing ourselves to seeking justice."

"We are looking for solutions and answers for how not to let it happen again," said Mohammed. "We will not surrender to sadness. We will not surrender to subjugation. We will have our say."

The full hearing is featured in the video below.
http://new.livestream.com/ccrjustice/righttoheal/videos/46280957

[ProSense]

19. Is that a yes or a no? n/t

[G_j]

20. LOL

[ProSense]

23. No answer? n/t

[G_j]

24. thanks, but no thanks

sorry, I know you are all ready to high jack the thread with a bunch of cut and paste.
Why don't you just watch the video and learn something?

[Scootaloo]

29. Do you understand the difference between "foreign aid" and "reparations"?

One is charity. The other is legal restitution for harm caused.

[ProSense]

15. Yes:

The End of the Iraq War: A Timeline



http://www.whitehouse.gov/iraq

Thanks, Obama!

[Catherina]

7. DU rec n/t

[Autumn]

11. Recommended

Some of us will never fucking forget.

[G_j]

13. k

[WillyT]

14. HUGE K & R !!!

[Hell Hath No Fury]

21. The day the bombs started dropping -

I stood in my kitchen, crying my eyes out. All I could think of were all of the innocent people who were about to die because of BushCo's insanity and the spinelessness of the Democratic Party.

Iraq is just one more Karmic debt our country will be paying for for a very long time.

[Zorra]

22. Yay! The system works!

The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle

(Neoliberalism as a puzzle: the useless global unity which fragments and destroys nations)

[KoKo]

25. Recommend...it's important!

[CrispyQ]

26. While George Bush paints self-portraits & Cheney gets invited to Sunday morning talk shows.

But when you're the world's super power you get to look forward, not back.

[NCTraveler]

27. K&R.

Thankfully Obama ended the war. It's continuation would have only made things worse. Fuck Bush.

[Steve Martines]

30. Not all was bad. As Obama pointed out, it was a multi-lateral effort

unlike the Crimean invasion.

[johnnyreb]

31. I don't see many Iraq-war-supporters taking any responsibility. Whatsoever.

[mike_c]

32. I'm shocked and offended by suggestions that it's time to get over Iraq....

For example: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024742755