[Mb-civic] 1000 dead US soldiers under Bush, bad news if Iran is next, ecomess in the Gulf

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

These 3 cheerful (not!) little articles were forwarded to me by Ed (so if you are on 
his list you can delete this now!).  And I say--do NOT get depressed or hopeless--: 
get angry , get determined, get active!!  --mha atma


NY Newsday - August 3, 2004
http://www.nynewsday.com/mynews/ny-nybres033916439aug03,0,3705477.story

1,000 soldiers dead since 9/11

by Jimmy Breslin

A rocket-propelled grenade came out of the hot afternoon in Iraq on July 7
and made Pfc. Samuel Bowen of Cleveland the 1,000th member of the U.S.
military to die in battle since the World Trade Center attack.

The number of dead is carefully compiled by the Army Times newspaper,
which carries the most news about the war. The others who know he is the
1,000th are those who fought where he died.

Bowen died at 38 in the afternoon of July 7 when his Ohio National Guard
engineer convoy stopped because one of the trucks broke down. Bowen and a
dozen Guardsmen protected the convoy while a mechanic tried to repair the
truck. Iraqis fired a rocket-propelled grenade that killed Bowen and
wounded two others.

With a number of dead this high, an easily remembered figure that stands
in the sky and accuses the nation, it was not surprising to have the
government throw a little added tension into the steam and announce that
huge New York financial buildings have been targeted by al-Qaida. There
was an orange alert and cops and troops were all over.

Tom Ridge of Homeland Security made the announcement. Whenever I
see Ridge, I feel he is another on the Republican campaign staff. It seems
that whenever George Bush is in a little trouble, Ridge tells the public
that we are going to be attacked.

George Bush is in some sort of tight situation. Yesterday, he had the
figure of Sam Bowen, death number 1,000, and the report of the 9/11
Commission that he is hard-pressed to adopt. Bush the President said that
we were in terrible danger and needed the alert.

The specific facts the government says it has include a study of
inclines of underground parking garages. This took no breath away from
anybody who remembers the Jersey City cab-driver bombers getting stuck
behind a truck while trying to get out of the World Trade Center garage
just before the 1993 explosion. They also had horrifying details about
uniforms worn by building security people. The people who flew planes into
the Trade Center needed no uniforms. I believe the forgotten bin Laden
wants to bomb us tonight, if he can, but please don't try to frighten me
with old details and much of the rest available on the Internet.

At the Citigroup Center on Lexington and 53rd, 18 police cars were
parked. In a row, there were cars from the 112, 110, 114, 111, 112, 113,
109, 110 and 104 precincts. All pulled in from Queens. Don't ever say that
Queens doesn't fight. Officer Neumann, from the 108 in Long Island City,
was on duty in front of a clothes shop on the ground floor. "Is anybody
left in Queens?" he was asked. He laughed and was smart enough not to say
anything.

"The place is as empty as Sunday," a guy coming out of the building said.
He said he was from Washington Heights and that was it. "I just came from
a meeting of Boston Properties, we had 50 managers there. They were
worried about shops on the ground floor. One of them wants a concrete
barrier at the curb. One manager had a very good idea. He wanted to have
NYPD cops as rent-a-cops. You hire them off-duty for your building
security. In uniform."

Pfc. Sam Bowen, whose brave death caused Bush's people to spread fear, was
coming out of a PX in Camp Anaconda in Iraq on June 16 with a friend,
Ronald Eaton. They had bought soda. Suddenly, a rocket landed to Eaton's
right. Shrapnel ripped his side. There was a second rocket. shrapnel hit
Bowen. Then Bowen was on his feet. He dragged Eaton out of the area. "He
helped some others before he helped himself," Eaton was saying yesterday.
"Then he drove two and a half hours to our base at Tikrit. He was a true
hero."

Bowen was in the 112th Engineer Battalion of the Ohio National Guard. When
he arrived in Iraq, they had him in the morale, welfare and recreation
office. He got out of there in as hurry. He became a driver for a
sergeant, Paul Brondhaver. "He drove me 2,000 miles of combat patrols,"
Brondhaver recalls.

On July 7, Bowen was driving Brondhaver in an unarmored humvee. They
were last in the convoy that stopped. They got out to guard the others and
the rocket took care of Bowen.

Ronald Eaton, his friend, who lives in Lakewood, was at the armory
headquarters of their 112th Engineers for a party for a soldier
retiring. Two officers from the unit took Eaton off to the side. They told
him they just had come from telling Bowen's wife that he was dead in Iraq.
Eaton would not allow this to sink in. He was dazed and resistant. Bowen
was one side of his life.

Eaton yesterday was at Camp Atterbury in Indiana for medical treatment.
His liver took shrapnel.

"He can't be dead," Eaton said. "I think he'll come home with the unit in
February. Yes, sir, I do expect to see him."

He won't.

Copyright (c) 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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Published on Wednesday, August 4, 2004 by Ted Rall
(noted cartoonist & expert on Central Asia)

America's Last War

by Ted Rall

Things are a bit trickier for our Texas-grown dictator, George W. Bush,
burdened as he is by our annoying insistence on forcing him to run for the
office he stole fair and square. Now that the invasion of Iraq has been
universally acknowledged as an unjustifiable, counterproductive
distraction from a war on terror that has yet to begin, Bush needs a still
bigger war to distract us even more. Then, he figures, we'll forget about
Iraq the way Iraq made us forget about Afghanistan. North Korea.

Next up: Iran. It's time to get even for the hostages.

The Bush Administration began test-marketing a war against Iran by naming
it as a charter member of the Axis of EvilTM. For the moment, however,
electioneering to an alert-jittery electorate has forced the Bushies to
place their neofascist tendencies in a lockbox. Bush and Cheney are
deploying hoary Republican rhetorical ploys; referring to John Kerry as a
flipflopping limousine liberal may harken to such classic GOP candidacies
as Dole '96 and Reagan '80, but the war criminals of Guantánamo and Abu
Ghraib are playing the role of traditional Republicans only to close the
deal on a gullible electorate. Whether the Bushian neofascists win the
election or opt for another end run around democracy, planning for a
second-term war against Iran is already under way.

Last week's column described the Bushies' lame attempts to link Iran to
9/11. My prediction that they would float new rationales for war after
Iran-Al Qaeda failed to catch on has already come to pass. Now
Administration gofer Colin Powell is accusing Iran of--you guessed
it--trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The Bushies claim
Iran's nuclear power plants could easily be converted into facilities for
manufacturing weapons. "It is our judgment that Iran is developing nuclear
weapons and a nuclear weapons program, and we'll all have to take note of
this," Powell said on July 29.

They're using the same lies on Iran that they used for Iraq.

Iran, of course, had nothing to do with 9/11. It continues to allow
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to examine its facilities.
Though imperfect, Iran is a vibrant though nascent democracy that requires
only the passage of time to liberate its people. But as we've seen in
Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush's wars have little to do with 9/11, WMDs or
spreading democracy.

With nine percent of proven oil reserves, Iran was already the world's
fifth largest producer. July 14 brought an announcement that a new oil
field second in scale only to Saudi Arabia's legendary Ghawar facility had
been discovered there. "Iran possesses far larger oil reserves than
previously thought," writes Hooman Peimani in the Asia Times. (The Bushies
floated their Iran-Al Qaeda story a few days after news broke about the
Iranian oil strike.) Iran's newfound oil wealth, its strategic control of
the Persian Gulf and its ideal placement for a gas and oil pipeline from
the Caspian Sea--long considered the sane alternative to the
Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline--have mouths watering at Halliburton and the
White House it controls.

But, unlike Iraq, we won't have the chance to botch the occupation of
Iran. We won't get that far.

Iran's military could keep us bogged down indefinitely, à la Vietnam. It
has a combined active-duty troop strength of 600,000; reserves bring the
total to a million. They have a respectable navy, and least 300 fighter
jets. A vast nation the size of Texas, California and Montana combined,
Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq with twice its population,
living on mountainous, harsh terrain. Iranians fighting a U.S.-backed
Iraqi invasion during the '80s fought ferociously, which suggests that an
American expeditionary force would be met by similarly passionate
resistance.

The American military, already stretched thin and forced to "call back"
reservists to fight in Iraq, would probably have to go ahead with
contingency plans to bring back a large-scale draft next year. At least a
half-million conscripts would be needed for a fight that would likely drag
on for years. Hundreds of billions of dollars would be spent on hardware
and weaponry, not to mention lining the pockets of
Administration-connected war profiteers. War against Iran could easily
push us into the abyss of economic and moral bankruptcy. The draft would
prompt tens of thousands of young American men to flee. It would push out
of the community of nations once and for all.

And that's if Iran doesn't have nukes by then.

Iranian leaders, feeling the pressure of American occupation troops on
their borders with Iraq to the west and Afghanistan to the east, are well
aware of the fact that Bush would like to add them to their portfolio of
oil-rich Muslim puppet states. The crisis ratcheted up a notch when
Israel--which doesn't make a move without U.S. approval--threatened to
bomb Iranian nuke plants. "The United States is showing off by threatening
to use its wild dog, Israel [to attack Iran]," said Iranian spokesman
Seyed Masood Jazayeri. "[But our] reaction will be so harsh that Israel
will be wiped off the face of the earth and U.S. interests will be easily
damaged."

We would be wise to pay attention.

Copyright 2004 Ted Rall

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Reuters - August 4, 2004
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=586374
8&section=news

Annual 'Dead Zone' Spreads Across Gulf of Mexico

By Jeff Franks

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A huge "dead zone" of water so devoid of oxygen
that sea life cannot live in it has spread across 5,800 square miles of
the Gulf of Mexico this summer in what has become an annual occurrence
caused by pollution.

The extensive area of uninhabitable water may be contributing indirectly
to an unusual spate of shark bites along the Texas coast, experts said.

A scientist at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium said on
Tuesday measurements showed the dead zone extended from the mouth
of the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana 250 miles west to near
the Texas border and was closer to shore than usual because winds and
currents.

"Fish and swimming crabs escape (from the dead zone)," said Nancy
Rabalais, the consortium's chief scientist for hypoxia, or low oxygen,
research. "Anything else dies."

In the last 30 years, the dead zone has become an annual summer
phenomenon, fed by rising use of nitrate-based fertilizers by farmers in
the Mississippi watershed, Rabalais told Reuters.

The nitrates, carried into the gulf's warm summer waters by the river,
feed algae blooms that use up oxygen and make the water uninhabitable.

The dead zone's size has varied each year depending on weather
conditions, but averages about 5,000 square miles and remains in place
until late September or early October.

Virtually nothing is being done to stop the flow of nitrates into the
river, meaning the dead zone will reappear every year, Rabalais said.

The dead zone forces fish to seek better water, which may be a reason for
the recent shark bites on Texas beaches.

Three people have been bitten by sharks along the upper Texas coast this
year -- a high number for a state that has recorded only 18 shark attacks
since 1980.

Terry Stelly, an ecosystem biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Department, said increasing numbers of sharks have been found in recent
years in the waters along the Texas-Louisiana border, near the edge of the
dead zone.

Along with other factors, "chances are good they (sharks) were looking for
higher dissolved oxygen in the water," he said.

Rabalais agreed, saying "The higher number of sharks in shallow waters may
very likely be due to the low oxygen being close to the shore at the time
of the attacks."

"The available habitat for the sharks is definitely less when the low
oxygen is so widespread," she said.




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