Elections Have Consequences

by SixofNine 30 Replies latest jw friends

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  SixofNine

  And these are some of them. Link

  Transcript

  The Guardian: A US medical evacuation crew chief recounts the most traumatic mission he has ever flown

  The first patient, she had her left leg completely blown off. Her right leg was into a mush. It really wasn't much left but muscle. Her left arm was gone, and it was bandaged up. She was one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen before, and she was adorable, but she was covered in blood and dirt. And it was very hard, 'cause I have a—and she might have been seven, eight years old. I have a five-year-old daughter. It's very hard dealing with kids. Once we realized that these kids were bad off, we threw them on the bird. I took my daughter—or my—sorry—my girl. And my little girl was five years old, and she had—her left leg was mangled. There was really nothing left of it. There was just muscle tissue. It was bad. That was the longest flight I've ever had. It was only a couple of minutes, but it was the longest flight. The little girl with the tri-amputees, she had a thousand-yard stare, where she's just kind of staring off into space. She was already given drugs for pain, but she was already fading out. My little girl, I was holding her hand and I was comforting her as best as I can. It's very hard, because they are scared of the US soldiers. And it's very hard, because there's a language barrier, and you're trying to. But love is an international sign, and everybody can speak that international language. You can hold them and show them affection, but show them that it's going to be okay, even though they are scared and there's nothing you can do about it.

  I had a very hard problem, a very hard time. I could not look at the girl with the tri-amputees. It was very cowardice to know that this was this little girl's last breaths on earth, and she was in the back of a helicopter, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was—I—it was hard just to know that she was going to die and that I didn't have the common courtesy to at least look at her and hold her. And that's something that's rough, and it's hard to look at somebody knowing that they're going to die and there's nothing you can do about it. Our little girl, she was fading away. And if only we can get her fast enough, only if we can get her into the FST fast enough, we can maybe save her. And once we pulled them out, we had to make the decision, because we still had three or four more urgent surgicals in the back of , we had to make the decision to put on the fricking ground and take off. And that was—you can't. You can't do that. You can't, as a human, leave another human hurt on the ground. But we had to do it.

  And, you know, we're 24 years old, we're, you know, 25, 26. We're young. Who says we need to make that decision? But we had to, because we had to save those other lives. I've never had so much blood in a helicopter before. And you're there, you're washing, but you can't wash it all out. Like, there's always stuff there. It's always in your nooks and crannies. The smell is always there. It'll never go away. And that was the worst mission—one of the worst missions I—that was the worst mission I've ever been on. It shut me down for awhile.
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  SixofNine

  Movie. You watch.
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  Big Tex

  What's all this talk I keep hearing about erections? This sort of filthy, gutter talk has no place in decent society. Why do people need to keep talking about sex?! Sex Sex Sex. This younger generation has no respect. This sort of behavior is a sign of the degrading of morals today!

  Elections Have Consequences

  Oh.

  Well that's different then.

  Never mind.
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  FlyingHighNow

  Do you remember the double amputee Iraq veteran jogging with president Bush? Bush was completely oblivious to his culpability in the situation. GW Bush is gon' be doin' lotta community service when he gets to the other side:

  
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  Evidently

  That story is truly sad and moving, and since you were all touched by the plight of this child you will be happy to hear that due to the bravery of the US military (joined by the military of several additional countries) and our President, the children of Iraq now have a future they can look forward to. Instead of the regime that tortured and killed many little girls like this one, Iraq's children will inherit a country free of a murderer like Saddam Hussein.

  Security forces arrested hundreds of Dujail residents, including entire families, in the wake of a 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the town.

  Witnesses, including women, have recounted being tortured while in prison, farmlands were razed in retaliation and 148 Shiites were sentenced to death in connection to the shooting attack on Saddam. All 148 were killed, either dying under interrogation or executed.

  The charges against Saddam read by Abdel-Rahman included the arrest of 399 people, the torture of women and children, ordering the razing of farmlands.

  He was also charged in the deaths of nine people who Abdel-Rahman said were killed in the first days of the crackdown, as well as the deaths of 148 who were sentenced to execution by his Revolutionary Court.

  But prosecutors argued that the crackdown went far beyond the actual authors of the attack to punish the entire town. It said the 148 were sentenced to death after a fake trial, and that children as young as 11 were among those convicted.

  6. 1985: 300 Kurdish children interned, tortured and murdered
  Records show 300 Kurdish children and young people imprisoned in the year 1985 to have simply disappeared. In 1987 amnesty international discovered the following. Many of the young people had been beaten, sexually abused and tortured with electroshocks. Detailed information has been provided on 29 executions. Sometimes it was only by paying a fee that parents could collect the bodies of their children.

  A mass grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, the Kurdish newspaper Taakhi reported today.

  “Citizens discovered on May 30 a communal grave close to Debs, in Kirkuk. But this is different from other mass graves discovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s terrorist regime because it contains the remains of 200 child victims of the repression of the Kurdish uprising” in 1991, the paper said.
  “Even dolls were buried with the children,” it said.

  Horror in Saddam's Iraq takes endless forms. In 1987-88, Iraqi Air Force helicopters sprayed scores of Kurdish villages with a combination of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, Sarin, and VX, a deadly nerve agent. Scores of thousands of Kurds, most of them women and children, died horrible deaths. Of those who survived, many were left blind or sterile or crippled with agonizing lung damage.

  So what do you think, is the truly agonizing story of the little girl above of more significance than the thousands of women and children that this merciless dictator murdered.
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  John Doe

  I don't see this kind of jockeying for position as any different from the right who use hyperbolic stories of abortion anomolies to further their agenda.
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  avishai

  Sixo, have you seen the film "I know I'm not alone" by michael franti? I think you'd really dig it, it's one helluva powerful movie.

  Here it is..

  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=640329739153932134&hl=en-CA
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  Evidently

  One more........

  But most of the Kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves. Those victims were mostly men and boys, and their bodies have never been recovered.

  In one village near Kirkuk, after the males were taken to be killed, the women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One survivor, Salma Aziz Baban, described the ordeal to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported on Saddam's war against the Kurds in The New Yorker in March.

  More than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat. When someone starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through an window in the door. Baban's six-year-old son grew very sick. "He knew he was dying. There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much." He died in his mother's lap.

  "I was screaming and crying," she told Goldberg. "We gave them the body. It was passed outside, and the soldiers took it."

  Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial. She saw 20 dogs roaming in a field where the dead bodies had been dumped. "I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs. The dogs were eating my son." She was silent for a moment. "Then I lost my mind."

  Horror without end. Amnesty International once listed some 30 different methods of torture used in Iraq. They ranted from burning to electric shock to rape. Some governments go to great lengths to keep evidence of torture secret. Saddam's government tends to flaunt its tortures, leaving the broken bodies of its victims in the street or returning them, mangled and mutilated, to their families.

  For the second time in a dozen years, America is preparing to go to war against Iraq, this time with "regime change" as an explicit goal. The case for military action is being made primarily in the name of international law and stability: Iraq under Saddam egregiously violates UN resolutions, attacks other countries without cause, aids terrorists, uses and stockpiles biological and chemical weapons, actively pursues nuclear weapons, and purposely creates environmental catastrophes.

  Saddam has successfully resisted every form of outside pressure short of war. Neither economic sanctions nor UN inspections nor limited missile strikes have subdued his aggressiveness. There is no question that his regime is profoundly dangerous and will grow even more so if it is not destroyed once and for all.

  It is all true. But let us not forget something equally true: Above all else, Saddam has been an unspeakable evil for the people of Iraq. In crushing him and his dictatorship, we will be liberating the most cruelly enslaved nation on earth and performing an act of nearly incalculable mercy.
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  BizzyBee

  the children of Iraq now have a future they can look forward to.

  And when, exactly, is this future going to start? And how many more soldiers and children will die before then?
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  FlyingHighNow

  So, the US goes in and kills and maims thousands more children. And you don't see something wrong with this picture. You kill thousands more and this somehow makes things better?