Month: February 2004

Hedy Epstein, 79, of St. Louis, Missouri is a Holocaust survivor, Holocaust educator and longtime civil rights and peace activist. Her story is featured in the Academy Award winning documentary, “Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.”

In 1939, I left the village of Kippenheim, Germany, on a Kindertransport – a small group of children allowed to go to England – thus surviving the Holocaust. In December, I went to Israel to honor the memory of my parents, Ella and Hugo Wachenheimer, who did not survive the war against the Jews. At a monument near Jerusalem, I lit candles for my parents and for the other 80,000 Jews deported from France to the death camps. It is impossible to visit Israel these days without being aware of the constant threat posed by terrorists. Suicide bombs kill and maim innocent persons riding in buses or taking a meal in a restaurant. We Jews who survived the Shoah know all too well that the intentional targeting of civilians is illegal and immoral. So I grieve the loss of life in Jerusalem from the suicide bombs.

But I also grieve the loss of life in Palestine, which occurs almost on a daily basis. So I went to Palestine as a member of the International Solidarity Movement to observe the difficult conditions of daily life under military occupation. It would have been enough to reach out and touch just one Palestinian and place my hand on her shoulder and tell her that I was with her in her pain. But I saw and did much more.

Yes, Ms. Epstein did much more … read here

Jen Banbury makes a visit to the Green Zone, headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Hunkered down in their weird security zone, the Americans who run Iraq have almost no contact with the country or its people.

Though I can see some of Baghdad’s American-occupied Green Zone from the roof of the house I live in — there, just across the river — the vastness of the enclosure, encased by imported barrier walls, means that to reach the public entrance I must drive a crazy labyrinthine loop through the city. With hundreds of thousands of other cars on the road, all forced to circumvent this American-made fortress, the trip can take 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the vagaries of traffic … read more

Renaud Girard of Le Figaro (France) comments on the wisdom of miltary intervention in the crisis in Haiti, a former French colony.

Before invading a country, it is appropriate to answer several questions. What type of social and political organization is to be established? Will the means (intellectual, financial, military, administrative) for this policy be sufficient? How long will it be necessary to remain in the country? How many soldiers are to be sacrificed? What will be the criteria of success? What level of success must be achieved for retreat to appear morally justified? George W. Bush finds himself in big trouble with the American electorate today for having failed to ask these questions about Iraq a year ago (and for having invoked the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction). … read more

In the frenetic rush to war, much was said about Iraq’s alleged ongoing bioterror programs. Many of us sat spellbound and shocked (and for more than just one reason) as Colin Powell stood before the United Nations and itemized the threats facing the world’s population from Saddam Hussain’s possession of WMDs. We’ve heard over and over the now-debunked allegations — at least I thought I had heard all of them. It seems in all the clamor of the drumbeating, I missed hearing one of threats. It must have been a very brief senior moment for me because I don’t remember “rail cars” being repeated again and I was surprised when I found it quoted on the CIA’s web page: Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants, 28 May 2003

Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade UN weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the UN did not conduct inspections in observance of the Muslim holy day…

So I went back and pulled up Secretary of State Powell’s UN speech of February 5, 2003 and sure enough there it was:

“Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. We have diagrammed what our sources reported about these mobile facilities. Here you see both truck and rail car-mounted mobile factories. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities are highly detailed and extremely accurate…As shown in this diagram, these factories can be concealed easily, either by moving ordinary-looking trucks and rail cars along Iraq’s thousands of miles of highway or track, or by parking them in a garage or warehouse or somewhere in Iraq’s extensive system of underground tunnels and bunkers…”

There are some who still contend that Saddam Hussain did indeed have all these mobile weapons laboratories and that they may still be hidden away — in fact, the CIA is currently offering rewards for information of the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD — but how do you hide a rail car? You can’t just drive it off into someone’s garage and close the door. You can’t sneak it over the border into another country in the dead of night even during a sandstorm without someone noticing a train moving across. And with all the satellite and overflight photographs, you can’t bury it out in the desert and then bulldoze up miles of railroad track so they can’t be followed. So, where are the railcars?

Is it just me who believes we need to dredge up all of these “intelligence” sources and their handlers and get some heads rolling? They lied, and thousands died.

In order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, stop-loss and stop-movement orders are preventing those who would choose to leave the military from doing so, adding to the strain on families where both husband and wife are soldiers and facing separations of as long as two years.

Brian Stewmon returned late last month from an 11½-month tour in Iraq. He got home just in time to kiss his wife goodbye and send her off on her own yearlong deployment. “We expected separation, but we never expected two years,” Michelle Stewmon said last week, just after arriving in Kuwait. “People don’t know that it’s going on. They’re shocked this is happening.” The Stewmons are among a small number of dual-military families taking a double-barreled hit from the Army’s supercharged operations tempo the past two years.

Servicemembers who marry know it’s possible that one or both could be deployed. Most Army families have endured a South Korean or Balkans tour. But Operation Iraqi Freedom, with its one-year tours and large personnel demands, has boosted the burden to something no pre-9/11 soldier could have imagined.
… read more

French General Philippe Morillon, whose intervention saved the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica from defeat in 1993 and helped establish it as a “safe area” for civilians (and the 28th Infantry Division of the Bosnian [Muslim] Army), made a fatal error last week. He let the truth slip out in his testimony against Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague Inquisition. Now the association of former Srebrenica residents plans to sue him for being an “accessory to genocide”, reported a Croatian daily. Continue reading “Telling the truth now a crime in Bosnia?”