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Nov. 16, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:34
912 Standing in blood (audio to a video)

The latest from Iraq

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Hello, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing well.
Let's get straight to business. From Correspondence in New York, November 15, 2007, the U.S. military is experiencing a suicide epidemic, with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 per week.
According to an investigation by US television network CBS, at least 6,256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005, an average of 17 a day.
The network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.
While the suicide rate among the general population, we go into some figures, among veterans aged 20 to 24, it was almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.
These numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems, CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.
CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.
I've never heard that before. Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total, Mike Baumann says.
They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.
There are 25 million veterans in the United States.
1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS. This is the first time that a nationwide count of veteran suicides has been tallied.
Washington a few days earlier, veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, although they are only 11% of the general adult population.
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-aged and elderly veterans.
Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
And some advocates say that the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future.
It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam vets to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless.
advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.
So obviously these are smashed and broken lives.
And They, of course, were sent over there as propagandized children with guns.
They don't know what they're there for.
They don't understand the costs and the nature of violence.
One of the reasons that we have to have the young fight the war is that the young don't know the costs of violence, whereas older people often do.
So, I don't often read other people's work, but this is an article I'm going to read in its entirety.
I really strongly recommend that you listen through to the end if you don't mind.
No remembrance, no remorse for the fallen of Iraq.
On Remembrance Day 2007, Veterans Day in America, the great and the good bowed their heads at the cenotaph.
Generals, politicians, newsreaders, football managers and stock market traders wore their poppies.
Hypocrisy was a presence.
No one mentioned Iraq.
This is a British writer.
No one uttered the slightest remorse for the fallen of that country.
No one read the forbidden list.
The forbidden list documents without favor the part the British state and its court have played in the destruction of Iraq.
Here it is. 1.
Holocaust denial. On the 25th of October, Di Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq.
Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied, We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003.
This was a deception.
In October 2006, The Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and Al-Mustansirya University in Baghdad, which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion.
A freedom of information search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable.
The Chief Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defense, Sir Roy Anderson, called its methods robust and close to best practice.
Other senior government officials secretly acknowledged the survey as survey's tried and tested way of measuring mortality in combat zones.
Since then the British research polling agency Opinion Research Business has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq.
Thus the scale of death caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed that of the Rwandan genocide, making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th making it the biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th and
Number two, looting.
The undeclared reason for the invasion of Iraq was the convergent ambitions of the neocons or neo-fascists in Washington and the far-right regimes of Israel.
Both groups had long wanted Iraq crushed and the Middle East colonized to U.S. and Israeli designs.
The initial blueprint for this was the 1992 Defense Plan and Guidance, which outlined America's post-Cold War plans to dominate the Middle East and beyond.
Its authors included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, And Colin Powell, architects of the 2003 invasion.
Following the invasion, Paul Brenner, a neocon fanatic, was given absolute civil authority in Baghdad and, in a series of decrees, turned the entire future Iraqi economy over to US corporations.
As this was lawless, the corporate plunderers were given immunity from all forms of prosecution.
The Blair government was fully complicit and even objected when it looked as if UK companies might be excluded from the most profitable looting.
British officials were awarded functionary colonial posts.
A petroleum quote law will allow in effect foreign oil companies to approve their own contracts over Iraq's vast energy resources.
This will complete the greatest theft since Hitler stripped his European conquests.
3. Destroying a nation's health In 1999, I interviewed Dr.
Jawad al-Ali, a cancer specialist at the Basra City Hospital.
Before the Gulf War, he said, we had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer.
Now, it's 30 to 35 percent patients dying every month.
Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 percent of this population in this area will get cancer.
Iraq was then in the grip of an economic and humanitarian siege initiated and driven by the U.S. and Britain.
The result, wrote Hans von Spohneck, then chief UN humanitarian official in Baghdad, was, quote, genocidal.
Practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death, and destruction of its physical and mental foundations.
Most of southern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic debris of the British and American explosives.
Including uranium-238 shells, Iraqi doctors pleaded in vain for help citing levels of leukemia among children as the highest seen since Hiroshima.
Professor Carol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organization's cancer program, wrote in the BMJ, quote, requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs, And analgesics are consistently blocked by the United States and British advisors to the Sanctions Committee.
In 1999, Kim Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the export to Iraq of vaccines that would protect mostly children from diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever, which he said are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction.
Since 2003, apart from PR exercises for the embedded media, the British occupiers have made no attempt to re-equip and resupply hospitals that prior to 1991 were regarded as the best in the Middle East.
In July, Oxfam reported that 43% of Iraqis were living in, quote, absolute poverty.
Under the occupation, malnutrition rates among children have spiraled to 28%.
A secret Defense Intelligence Agency document, Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities, reveals that the civilian water supply was deliberately targeted.
As a result, the great majority of the population has neither access to running water nor sanitation, in a country where such basic services were once as universal as in Britain.
The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein area, said Dr.
Haidar Salah, a pediatrician at Basra's Children's Hospital.
Children are dying daily and no one is doing anything to help them.
In January this year, nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then International Development Secretary.
Describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations as an occupying power under UN Security Council Resolution 1483, Ben refused to see them.
The UN estimates that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month.
The refugee crisis has now overtaken that of Darfur as the most catastrophic on Earth.
Half of Iraq's doctors have gone along with engineers and teachers.
The most literate society in the Middle East is being dismantled piece by piece.
Out of more than 4 million displaced people, Britain last year refused the majority of more than 1,000 Iraqis who applied to come here, while removing more illegal Iraqi refugees than any other European country.
Thanks to tabloid-inspired legislation, Iraqis in Britain are often destitute, with no right to work and no support.
They sleep and scavenge in parks.
The government, says Amnesty, quote, is trying to starve them out of the country.
Five.
Propaganda.
See, in my line of work, said George W. Bush, you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in to kind of catapult the propaganda.
Standing outside 10 Downing Street on 9th April 2003, the BBC's then political editor Andrew Marr reported the fall of Baghdad as a victory speech.
Tony Blair, he told viewers, said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating, and on both of these points he has been proven conclusively right.
And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.
In the United States, similar travesties passed as journalism.
The difference was that leading American journalists began to consider the consequences of the role they had played in the build-up to the invasion.
Several told me they believed that had the media challenged and investigated Bush's and Blair's lies, instead of echoing and amplifying them, the invasion might not have happened.
A European study found that of the major Western television networks, the BBC permitted less coverage of dissent than all of them.
A second study found that the BBC consistently gave credence to government propaganda that weapons of mass destruction existed.
And like The Sun, the BBC has credibility.
Or does, as does or did the Observer.
On 14th October 2001, the London Observer front page said, US hawks accuse Iraq over hand threats.
This was entirely false.
Supplied by U.S. intelligence, it was part of the Observer's staunchly pro-war coverage, which included claiming a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, for which there was no credible evidence, and which portrayed the paper's honorable past.
One report over two pages was headlined, The Iraqi Connection.
It too came from, quote, intelligence sources and was rubbish.
The reporter David Rose concluded his barren inquiry with a heartfelt plea for the invasion.
There are occasions in history, he wrote, when the use of force is both right and sensible.
Rose has since written his mea culpa, including in these pages, confessing how he was used.
Other journalists still have to admit how they were manipulated by their own credulous relationship with established power.
These days, Iraq is reported as if it is exclusively a civil war, with the US military surge aimed at bringing peace to the scrapping natives.
The perversity of this is breathtaking.
That sectarian violence is the product of a vicious divide-and-conquer policy is beyond doubt.
As for the largely media myth of Al-Qaeda, Most of the American press pros will tell you, wrote Seymour Hersh, that the foreign fighters are a couple percent and they're sort of leaderless.
That a poorly armed, audacious resistance has not only pinned down the world's most powerful army but has agreed on an anti-sectarian, anti-al-Qaeda agenda which opposes attacks on civilians and calls for free elections is not news.
Six, the next bloodletting.
In the 1960s and 1970s, British government secretly expelled the population of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean whose people have British nationality.
Women and children were loaded onto vessels resembling slave ships and dropped in the slums of Mauritius after their homeland was given to the Americans for a military base.
Three times the High Court has found this atrocity illegal, calling it a defiance of the Magna Carta and the Blair government's refusal to allow the people to go home outrageous and repugnant.
The government continues to use endless recourse to appeal, at the taxpayers' expense, to prevent upsetting Bush.
The cruelty of this match is the fact that not only has the US repeatedly bombed Iraq from Diego Garcia, but at Camp Justice on the island, al-Qaeda suspects are rendered and tortured, according to the Washington Post.
Now the US Air Force is rushing to upgrade hangar facilities on the island so that stealth bombers can carry 14-ton bunker-busting bombs in an attack on Iran.
orchestrated propaganda in the media is critical to the success of this act of international piracy.
On 22nd May, the front page of the London Guardian carried the banner headline: "Iran's secret plan for a summer offensive to force the US out of Iraq!" This was a tract of unalloyed propaganda based entirely on anonymous US official sources.
Throughout the media, other drums have taken up the heat, the beat.
Iran's nuclear ambitions slips effortlessly from newsreaders' lips, no matter what the International Atomic Energy Agency has refuted Washington's lies, no matter the echo of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, no matter that another bloodbath beckons, lest we forget.
I know that people get confused by my approach to the question of a state of society.
Why would you work so hard?
Why would you quit your career?
Why would you expose yourself like this?
For the sake of something like a stateless society.
A voluntaryist society.
Is it because you hate the welfare state?
Is it because you would like the roads to be privatized so you can bypass traffic jams?
Is it because you would like children to get better education?
All of those are not unimportant.
I would like the currency to be more stable.
I would like economic growth to be the rising tide that lifts all boats and helps people out of poverty.
I would like the people currently incarcerated in prisons to be free of their torture and rape, of course.
But I must tell you, it has a lot to do with these poor fucking Iraqis.
Thank you.
1.2 million Murdered as a result of this war.
America has 10 times the population.
Imagine 12 million Americans being murdered and 1 million Americans fleeing America every month.
Just imagine, just imagine, just imagine your entire society, your entire life detonated, decimated, your children dying helpless, rickety and starving, wracked with disease and malnutrition in your arms.
Repeatedly, imagine fearing every airplane, every possible disease that you have in your body.
There's a sign of cancer or leukemia in your children or death of some horrible, slow, wasting kind.
Imagine watching your country and the best in your country, those that you desperately need to help you survive, the engineers, the doctors, fleeing the country to live in tents with no future and barely enough food.
Imagine being stuck in the limbo, in the null zone between countries for years, for decades.
Imagine what your life would be like if you were them.
Yeah.
Helpless, bullied and tortured and murdered by Saddam Hussein, installed and maintained by the United States.
For a decade, with the US and Anglo blockade, half a million children, half a million Iraqi children died in hospitals in their parents' arms.
For lack of food, lack of medicine, lack of inoculations.
Five million American children would have to die as an equivalent.
Remember how angry you were when 3,000 Americans died on 9-11.
Five million children, 12 million Americans, a million Americans fleeing the country every year because it is being turned into a desert.
As they say of Rome, they made a desert and called it peace.
They have made Iraqi a desert.
And it is not even peaceful.
And this is the cost of our patriotism.
This is the cost Of believing in these sick fantasies of states and governments and the virtue of violence in any form.
For the roads, for the poor, for the sick, for the old.
That is the bait on the hook that breeds war!
You can't get state control of education without this kind of genocide.
You can't get Collective services like roads and sewage and garbage collection without this slaughter!
Because violence breeds violence.
If we say we can point guns at people to help the poor in the form of income redistribution, if we say that we can point guns at people to help the old, then the guns will be pointed at you to fund the slaughter.
When you salute the flag, you stand in blood.
When you praise the military, you stand in blood.
When you praise a politician, when you join a political party, you stand in blood, you wade in blood.
When you say the government should do this or the government should do that, you stand in rising blood and it is almost covering our mouths by now.
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