Rabbi Arthur Waskow: 1,000 : Afghanistan Milestone of Death

On April 5, 2009,the American public saw the flag-draped casket of a fallen service member for the first time since 1991 -- that of Staff Sergeant Phillip Meyers. Sadly, we've seen way too many more.
Milestone of death: 1,000 GIs
And God knows how many Afghans

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / February 20, 2010

Usually we look upon the next milestone in our lives as a great step forward. But we also need to mark and mourn milestones of death, not only the physical deaths of beloved people but explosions of moral and ethical death for those who brought about these deaths -- milestones that remind us of how human beings -- who bear the Image of God -- are killing other human beings who bear the Image of God.

For this kind of death, God is inconsolable, and we should be as well.

We have nearly reached the tragic milestone of the death of the 1,000th U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. As of this writing, the most reliable source (icasualities.org) lists 998 U.S. soldiers as having died in Afghanistan. So it is sadly probable that the milestone will be reached in the next few days. Check the link above.

God only knows how many Afghans have now died in this war, including many civilians -- just recently, an entire family, including six children, in a house bombed by "mistake," for which the U.S. military "apologized." But no apology can redress those deaths. We can mourn them, however, along with the American dead.

Various groups are preparing vigils throughout the USA. Some will be the day after, others are scheduled for the next working day. There seems to be no national list; if you find one near you, I urge you to join it and/or to mark this moment in prayerful communal services or private prayer and meditation this weekend.

I hope and urge that such memorial events will mourn the human and economic cost of war, call for the troops to come home, and support transferring most of the funds being spent for death to meeting the urgent public needs of our own country, with some going to fund an Afghan-led reconstruction of the war-torn country.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center; co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling -- Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism -- and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy. The Shalom Center voices a new prophetic agenda in Jewish, multireligious, and American life.]

Editor's note: As we publish this article, the total of GI deaths in Afghanistan stands at 999.

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The Shoe: 'Out of Loyalty to Every Drop of Innocent Blood That Has Been Shed'

Why I threw the shoe

I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents

By Muntazer al-Zaidi / September 17, 2009

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacres of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

[Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this week after serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at former US president George Bush at a press conference. This edited statement was translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Sahar Issa www.mcclatchydc.com.]

Source / The Guardian, U.K.

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Afghanistan: Needless Civilian Death Continues

It is time to start acknowledging the lies of the Obama administration. They will close Guantanamo, but the military tribunals will resume shortly (they will be more "humane and effective"). They will stop the Iraq war, but the civilian murders in Iraq and Afghanistan especially, with concomitant lies about responsibility, will continue. They will reform health care, but only with the blessings of the insurance industry and big pharma. They will bring us change.

I have been blinded by Barack Obama's "change."

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

A 12-year-old recovered at a hospital in Herat, Afghanistan, from burns suffered during an American airstrike on her village. Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times.
Afghan Villagers Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes
By Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah / May 14, 2009

FARAH, Afghanistan — The number of civilians killed by the American airstrikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan.

“We were very nervous and afraid and my mother said, ‘Come quickly, we will go somewhere and we will be safe,’ ” said Tillah, 12, recounting from a hospital bed how women and children fled the bombing by taking refuge in a large compound, which was then hit.

The bombs were so powerful that people were ripped to shreds. Survivors said they collected only pieces of bodies. Several villagers said that they could not distinguish all of the dead and that they never found some of their relatives.

Government officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the villagers of 147 dead civilians. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue their own count.

The calamity in the village of Granai, some 18 miles from here, illustrates in the grimmest terms the test for the Obama administration as it deploys more than 20,000 additional troops here and appoints a new commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, in search of a fresh approach to combat the tenacious Taliban insurgency.

It is bombings like this one that have turned many Afghans against the American-backed government and the foreign military presence. The events in Granai have raised sharp questions once again about the appropriateness and effectiveness of aerial bombardment in a guerrilla war in which the insurgents deliberately blend into the civilian population to fight and flee.

Taliban insurgents are well aware of the weakness and are making the most of it, American and Afghan officials say. Farah, a vast province in the west, contains only a smattering of foreign special forces and trainers who work among Afghan police and army units. Exploiting the thin spread of forces, the insurgents sought to seize control of Granai and provoke a fierce battle over the heads of the civilian population, Afghan and American officials say.

After hours of fighting and taking a number of casualties, the American forces called in their heaviest weapon, airstrikes, on at least three targets in the village.

The rapid mass burial of the victims and the continuing presence of insurgents in the area have hampered investigations. Journalists were advised against visiting Granai. Villagers were interviewed here in Farah, the provincial capital, where they came to collect compensation payments, and in the neighboring province of Herat, where some were taken for treatment.

Much of the villagers’ descriptions matched accounts given by the United States military spokesman, Col. Greg Julian, and the provincial police chief, Col. Abdul Ghafar Watandar. But they differed on one important point: whether the Taliban had already left Granai before the bombing began.

There was particular anger among the villagers that the bombing came after, they say, the Taliban had already left at dusk, and the fighting had subsided, so much so that men had gone to evening prayers at 7 p.m. and returned and were sitting down with their families for dinner.

The police chief said that sporadic fighting continued into the night and that the Taliban were probably in the village until 1 a.m.

Whatever the case, American planes bombed after 8 p.m. in several waves when most of the villagers thought the fighting was over; and whatever the actual number of casualties, it is clear from the villagers’ accounts that dozens of women and children were killed after taking cover.

One group went to a spacious compound owned by a man named Said Naeem, on the north side of the village, where the two girls were wounded. Only one woman and six children in the compound survived, one of their fathers said.

Another group gathered in the house of the village imam, or religious leader, Mullah Manan. That, too, was bombed, causing an equally large number of casualties, villagers said. Colonel Julian, the American military spokesman, said that the airstrikes hit houses from which the Taliban were firing. The enormous explosions left such devastation that villagers struggled to describe it. “There was someone’s legs, someone’s shoulders, someone’s hands,” said Said Jamal, an old white-bearded man with rheumy eyes, who lost two sons and a daughter. “The dead were so many.”

A joint government and United States military delegation visited Granai last week but came back sharply divided in their conclusions. The Afghan government said that 140 civilians were killed and 25 wounded, and that 12 houses were destroyed.
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The United States military said the Afghan numbers were far too high. This week, a senior military investigator, Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III of the United States Army, arrived to conduct an in-depth inquiry for the region’s overall military commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus.

An independent Afghan organization, Afghanistan Rights Monitor, said Wednesday that at least 117 civilians were killed — including 26 women and 61 children — drawing on interviews with 21 villagers and relatives of the dead. The group criticized both the Taliban for fighting among civilians, and the United States military for using excessive force.

The police chief, Colonel Watandar, confirmed much of the villagers’ accounts of the fighting. A large group of Taliban fighters, numbering about 400, they estimated, entered the village and took up positions at dawn on May 4. By midmorning, the Taliban began attacks on police posts on the main road, just yards from the village, they said.

The fighting raged all day. The police called in more police officers, Afghan Army units and an American quick reaction force from the town of Farah as reinforcements.

By midafternoon, the exchanges escalated sharply and moved deeper into the village. Taliban fighters were firing from the houses, and at one point a Marine unit called in airstrikes to allow Marines to go forward and rescue a wounded Afghan soldier, said Colonel Julian, the United States military spokesman. After that, Taliban fire dropped significantly, he said.

A villager named Multan said that one house along the southern edge of the village was hit by a bomb and that one Taliban fighter was killed there. But villagers did not report any civilian casualties until the American planes bombed that night.

Tillah, the 12-year-old girl, whose face bears the scars of a scorching blast, still twisted in pain from the burning in her leg at the provincial hospital in Herat, where she and other survivors were taken to a special burn unit. Her two sisters, Freshta, 5, and Nuria, 7, were barely visible under the bandages swathing their heads and limbs.

The three girls were visiting their aunt’s house with their mother when a plane bombed the nearby mosque, around 8 p.m., Tillah said. That is when they fled to Said Naeem’s seven-room home.

“When we reached there we felt safe and I fell asleep,” Tillah said. She said she heard the buzzing noise of a plane, but then only remembers coming to when someone pulled her from the rubble the next morning.

A second girl, Nazo, 9, beside her in another hospital bed, said she saw two red flashes in the courtyard that kicked up dust seconds before the explosion.

“I heard a loud explosion and the compound was burning and the roof fell in,” she said. Seven members of the family with her died, and four were wounded, her father, Said Malham, said.

“Why do they target the Taliban inside the village?” he asked wearily. “Why don’t they bomb them when they are outside the village?”

“The foreigners are guilty,” he continued. “Why don’t they bomb their targets, but instead they come and bomb our houses?”

[Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.]

Source / New York Times

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Honoring the Dead : 'Eyes Wide Open'

Photo of Eyes Wide Open on the Mall in Washington DC by AFSC.
Boots on the ground in Austin this weekend
By Susan Van Haitsma / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2008

In February 2005, the display of combat boots and civilian shoes called "Eyes Wide Open" came to Austin, where it was assembled on the grounds of Zilker Park at the Peace Grove. At dawn on a misty morning, I joined a crew of volunteers to lay out the boots and shoes. It was a profound experience.

The exhibit drew visitors from the moment the boots and shoes were set down to the night we had to pack them up due to rain chances. Viewers followed the exhibit to the indoor location where it was set up the following day.

Now, three and a half years later, the number of combat boots and shoes representing soldier and civilian lives taken by the invasion and occupation of Iraq has grown so much that the exhibit has been divided by state.

Eyes Wide Open is scheduled to be displayed at Auditorium Shores this weekend along Lady Bird Lake near the hike and bike trail opposite Butler Park. A special program will be presented on Saturday night. It's not a partisan event. Everyone is invited.

Here are the particulars, as posted at Eyes Wide Open / AFSC.

An Exhibition On The Human Cost of the Iraq War

Eyes Wide Open, the American Friends Service Committee’s widely acclaimed exhibition on the human cost of the Iraq War, returns to Austin.

The exhibit features a pair of boots honoring each Texas military casualty, a field of shoes to memorialize the Iraqis killed in the conflict, and a display exploring the history, cost and consequences of war. To view past Eyes Wide Open exhibits, visit the website http://www.afsc.org/eyes/.

When? The Weekend of September 12 - 14, 7AM-7PM

Where? Auditorium Shores West

Special candlelight remembrance: Saturday, September 13th, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. (If you would like to sit during the candlelight vigil, please bring your own chair.)

Hospitality tent for veterans, active military, and their families
Veterans are welcomed to wear medals in solidarity with the fallen

Rain Location:
Central Presbyterian Church
200 E. 8th St.

[Susan Van Haitsma posts as makingpeace on Statesman.com. ]

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