McCain's Collateral Damage

John McCain was responsible for the deaths of countless civilians in Vietnam. That is a fact that must not be “disappeared.” Information Clearinghouse presents this report and I urge you to visit their site and if possible, give financial support to this independent news service.
McCain and Rolling Thunder
War Hero or War Criminal?
By Robert Richter
October 16, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse"
As character assassination attacks on Sen. Barack Obama have now taken over Sen. John McCain's campaign, and because McCain cites his military experience as of prime importance, now is the time to focus closer attention on a facet of the Arizona Senator's own character. This is related to his 23 combat missions for Operation Rolling Thunder - the Pentagon's name for U.S. bombing of North Vietnam.
I will never forget how stunned I was when Gen. Telford Taylor, a chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two, told me that he strongly supported the idea of trying the U.S. pilots captured in North Vietnam as war criminals - and that he would be proud to lead in their prosecution.
An ardent opponent of the Vietnam conflict, Taylor spoke with me in the fall of 1966 when I was looking into producing a documentary on this controversy for CBS News, where I was their National Political Editor. While he did not mention any pilot's name, then U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander John McCain who was captured a year later, would have been among the group Taylor wanted to prosecute.
Why would anyone have wanted to prosecute McCain and the other captured pilots? Taylor's argument was that their actions were in violation of the Geneva conventions that specifically forbid indiscriminate bombing that could cause incidental loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects. Adding to the Geneva code, he noted, was the decision at the Nuremberg trials after World War Two: military personnel cannot defend themselves against such a charge with a claim that they were simply following orders.
There were questions raised about whether the Geneva conventions applied to the pilots, since there had been no formal declaration of war by the U.S. against the Hanoi regime - and the Geneva rules presumably are only in force in a “declared” war.
Anti-war critics at the time claimed that despite the Pentagon's assertion that only military targets were bombed, U.S. pilots also had bombed hospitals and other civilian targets, a charge that turned out to be correct and was confirmed by the New York Times' chief foreign correspondent, Harrison Salisbury.
In late 1966 Salisbury described the widespread devastation of civilian neighborhoods around Hanoi by American bombs: "Bomb damage...extends over an area of probably a mile or so on both sides of the highway...small villages and hamlets along the route [were] almost obliterated." U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara conceded some years later that more than a million deaths and injuries occurred in northern Vietnam each year from 1965 to 1968, as a result of the 800 tons of bombs a day dropped by our pilots. [The deaths and other problems continue in Vietnam and with our soldiers due to the poison, Agent Orange. Please visit my blog post of October 9, 2008, The Continuing Devestation of Agent Orange or click on the tag below for all posts on that subject.]
In one of his autobiographies McCain wrote that he was going to bomb a power station in “a heavily populated part of Hanoi” when he was shot down.
If Gen. Taylor tried McCain, would he have defended himself as “just following orders” despite the Geneva conventions barring that kind of bombing and the Nuremberg principles negating “just following orders?“
The targets McCain and his fellow pilots actually bombed in Vietnam and his justification then or now for the actions that led to his capture, are no longer simply old news. They are part of what must be taken into account today, as voters weigh support for him or Obama to be the next President of the United States.
This is not about the hugely unpopular war in Vietnam. It is about the character of a man who seeks to be U.S. President, who perhaps was not simply a brave warrior, but a warrior who by his own admission, bombed and was ready to bomb targets in violation of the Geneva conventions and Nuremberg principles.
When I passed along Gen. Taylor's comments to my network superiors the program was scrapped: too hot to handle. Instead Air War Over the North was telecast, about “precision bombing” North Vietnam military targets by U.S. pilots. A few years after that broadcast, a Pentagon public information executive gleefully told Roger Mudd in The Selling of the Pentagon that he, the Pentagon official, not only had persuaded CBS to produce Air War Over the North, he even chose those to be interviewed and coached them about what they should say. This unethical collaboration and intercession by the Pentagon in the news media is sadly all too familiar a tactic repeated in the Bush-Cheney years.
Robert Richter was political director for CBS News from 1965 to 1968.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21028.htm

The Ever-Continuing Body Count

Please remember: the murderous effects of DU on Iraq and Americans have yet to be measured.
Iraq conflict has killed a million, says survey
Wed Jan 30, 2008
LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups.The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the researchers found.
[...] The research covered 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Those that not covered included two of Iraq's more volatile regions -- Kerbala and Anbar -- and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work.
[...] Medical journal The Lancet published a peer-reviewed report in 2004 stating that there had been 100,000 more deaths than would normally be expected since the March 2003 invasion, kicking off a storm of protest.The widely watched Web site Iraq Body Count currently estimates that between 80,699 and 88,126 people have died in the conflict, although its methodology and figures have also been questioned by U.S. authorities and others.
ORB, a non-government-funded group founded in 1994, conducts research for the private, public and voluntary sectors. The director of the group, Allan Hyde, said it had no objective other than to record as accurately as possible the number of deaths among the Iraqi population as a result of the invasion and ensuing conflict. (Reporting by Luke Baker; editing by Andrew Roche)
http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSL30488579

"This is My First Time Out of Gaza"

Gaza's falling wall changes Middle East map for ever
The tide of humans pouring over the frontier from Gaza into Egypt for days has now become a vast convoy of carts, cars and lorries. Peter Beaumont joined the jubilant throng who watched as the borders of a conflict that has lasted for generations were crossed.
The Observer, Sunday January 27, 2008
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza's southern border. Four days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum had been reached.
[...] Ameera, 24, texts her husband to ask if there is anything he wants brought back from Egypt. 'Oh!', she says suddenly in a quiet, happy voice, surveying a pretty vista of open fields, without walls or boundaries that cannot be crossed without risk. 'This is my first time out of Gaza.' http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2247566,00.html
Here are two pictures with different stories. One shows an orderly cue of cars waiting to cross the border, the other shows chaos and fear. Below is another side of a day in Gaza.

Cookin' the Stats

From CounterPunch.org comes a very detailed and enlightening report on the latest "scientific" statistical report of Iraqi deaths compared to the much (unfairly) maligned Johns Hopkins study of 2004. To use the word "sloppy" for the NEJM study would be a gross understatement.
Andrew Cockburn is the author of Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy.
Gross Distortions, Sloppy Methodology and Tendentious Reporting
How the New England Journal of Medicine Undercounted Iraqi Civilian Deaths
By ANDREW COCKBURN
[…] Now we have a new result complied by the Iraqi Ministry of Health under the sponsorship of the World Health Organization and published in the once reputable New England Journal of Medicine, (NEJM) estimating the number of Iraqis murdered, directly or indirectly, by George Bush and his willing executioners at 151,000--far less than the most recent Johns Hopkins estimate.
[…] In particular, while Johns Hopkins reported that the majority of post invasion deaths were due to violence, the NEJM serves up the comforting assessment that only one sixth of deaths in this period have been due to violence.
[…] Among the many obfuscations in this new report, the most fundamental is the blurred distinction between it and the survey it sets out to discredit. The Johns Hopkins project sought to enumerate the number of excess deaths due to all causes in the period following the March 2003 invasion as compared with the death rate prior to the invasion, [whereas this report] sought to analyze only deaths by violence, imposing a measure of subjectivity on the findings from the outset. For example, does the child who dies because the local health clinic has been looted in the aftermath of the invasion count as a casualty of the war, or not?
[…] As the authors themselves admit, they did not visit a significant proportion of the original designated clusters: "Of the 1086 originally selected clusters, 115 (10.6%) were not visited because of problems with security," meaning they were inconveniently situated in Anbar province, Baghdad, and two other areas that were dangerous to visit, (especially for Iraqi government employees from a Shia-controlled ministry.) While such reluctance is understandable--one of those involved was indeed killed during the survey--it also meant that areas with very high death tolls were excluded from the survey.
[…] Les Roberts, one of the principal authors of the Johns Hopkins studies, has commented: "We confirmed our deaths with death certificates, they did not.
http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew01122008.html

If America was Invaded...

What Bush's invasion would look like in the United States
This map compares deaths and refugees in Iraq to the equivalent percentage in the United States. Click on the map or the link below to get a bigger image.
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2415&Itemid=81