[From the diaries by susanhu.]
this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
we honor courage in all its forms
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.
Hospital staff look at one of the bodies of victims of a prison shoot out in Baghdad, Iraq Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. An inmate in a Baghdad prison grabbed an assault rifle from a guard and opened fire on other guards and prisoners, killing at least eight people and injuring three, police said.
(AP Photo/Asaad Muhsin)
poem below the fold
Arnica / Absolution / Ambien
by Miranda Field
No mortal ever learns to go to sleep definitively. No baby, animal or
vegetable, intends to sink his vehicle in so soundless a lake. In such
cloudy houses, shadows take the shape of something “put to sleep.” Any
oblivion is a field or maze a creature grazes in for private reasons. The
edible flower taken from its bed to the table expires on your tongue, and
this is what we mean by sense of night and utterly internal to itself.
To go to sleep, I think of the bodies in their reservoirs, painstakingly
changing from opaque to phosphorescent. How all the while distracted
Nature pours a perfect solvent on their experiment. I take a half-pill, a
paradigm ignites, a moving sign in rain. I take a whole, the flame grows
lower. One and a quarter, it’s just a flicker. No sense asking who I am
then. Swinging from its dead twig in a bush, the aura-like cocoon, lit up
by winter sun– the least of its worries the worm.
– – –
put a meaningful magnet on your car or metal filing cabinet
read Ilona’s important diary at MLW – Returning Vet PTSD – One Soldier’s Story as well her comprehensive series on PTSD and Iraq War vets.
view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)
take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)
support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day
Click on the candle to copy the image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment.
” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
from Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Damn.
These people have familes, just like us.
…bring the promise of Peace.
Nine killed in failed Iraqi jailbreak
Peace
.
Man made quagmire in Iraq, may your area be shielded in the coming month from any dreadful call …
Dems’ Template for Success: Follow Jack Murtha …
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Mr. Rumsfeld, our Secretary of War, does he still sign each and every letter of bereavement personally? The fallen heroes in defending our borders 10,000 mi. from American soil because of an imminent and deadly threat from Iraqis.
Inmates Die in Baghdad Jail Shooting
Four wardens, four prisoners and an
interpreter died at the Adala base in Kadhimiya.
LEAVE … Iraq to the Iraqis
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼▼▼ READ MY DIARY ▼
.
BAGHDAD (WaPo) Dec. 24 — U.S. airstrikes in Iraq have surged this fall, jumping to nearly five times the average monthly rate earlier in the year, according to U.S. military figures.
Until the end of August, U.S. warplanes were conducting about 25 strikes a month. The number rose to 62 in September, then to 122 in October and 120 in November.
Iraqi families don’t count, it’s collateral damage …
New Precision GMLRS Helps In Battle For Tal
Afar - Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System
- was first test-fired outside of the U.S.
earlier this summer near Tikrit, Iraq.
Who said George and Rummy don’t have a plan?
● U.S. Forces Destroy Eight Bridges
● Attacks near Syrian border in Euphrates Valley
LEAVE … Iraq to the Iraqis
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼▼▼ READ MY DIARY ▼
When will it stop?
Let there be peace on Earth,
Let it start with me.
Out of Iraq Now!
of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq
Light A Candle For
Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
and For The Children – Innocence Lost!
The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq
“We once lived in a good place, but that was before the war. It got expensive after the war so we moved out. Now everything costs so much. The rents are too high. Food is not cheap. My husband can’t find work, so we live here. This war did little to help us. We are worse now than before. And to make matters worse, I am pregnant again.”
– NAHAD JABAR JOUAD, center
Living in an abandoned building with her husband and children More Photos
Published: December 26, 2005
IN Iraq, nobody knows, and few in authority seem concerned to count, just how many civilians have been killed and injured. Soon it will be three years since the American-led invasion. The estimates of those killed run into the tens of thousands, the numbers of wounded two or three times the number who lost their lives. Even President Bush, estimating recently that 30,000 civilians may have been killed, acknowledged that was no more than an abstraction from unofficial calculations, not a Pentagon count.
To take his own measure of the war for The New York Times, Adam Nadel broke from the compulsions that dictate the days of many photographers in Baghdad, the suicide bombings and roadside explosions and assassinations that fill the morgues and the hospitals. Over weeks, he went in search of those who had survived attacks, and others whose lives had been upended by the violence. He visited them in their hospital wards, in their neighborhoods, and in their homes, and captured, in images and in words, what the war has meant for them.
Their portraits and their stories compel attention, not because they have endured worse than others, but because their miseries are so commonplace, because they stand for what thousands of Iraqi families have endured, directly or through ties of community and tribe. In his or her own way, each of these survivors is a totem for all, in a war where nobody has an exemption from the bombs and the bullets and the carelessness, or mischance, that determines who lives and who dies.
To these Iraqis, the debate over whether the war has been just or unjust, whether the blame lies with Saddam Hussein, or the Americans, or the insurgents, is a distant thing, carrying no promise of relief from their pain. Their faces, like their words, speak of what they have lost, but also, mutely, of their struggle to find new meaning in their lives, to fill the void that war’s impact on noncombatants has always made of hope.
Posted on Wed, Dec. 28, 2005
CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Kurds preparing takeover; U.S. exit strategy at riskThe U.S. plan for leaving Iraq is in trouble, with more than 10,000 Kurds in the Iraqi army prepared to seize control of northern Iraq for an independent state.
BY TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder News Service
KIRKUK, Iraq – Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
SNIP
Will Go Home to Roost
Cindy Sheehan | 2006: The Year the Chickenhawks Will Go Home to Roost
Cindy Sheehan: In 2005, we learned that we have the power. We learned that we can’t rely on the propaganda media or the empty promises of most of our elected leadership. We learned that we need to be the change that we desire to see. We cannot relax in 2006
IMPEACH NOW
James Starowicz
USN ’67-’71 GMG3 Vietnam In-Country’70-’71 COMNAVFORV
Member: Veterans For Peace
VFP ‘Declaration Of Impeachment’
Sign On and Pass Link To Others
“We, having dutifully served our nation, do hereby
affirm our greater responsibility to serve the cause
of world peace by applying the concept of engaging
conflict peacefully, without violence.”
Veterans For Peace
Heads roll at Veterans Administration
Mushrooming depleted uranium (DU) scandal blamed
by Bob Nichols
Wow, Thanks for the link. 325K out of 580K GW1 vets sick. Astounding. Awful. Disgusting.
How heartwrenching. It’s really sad to see that families are being tear apart. It’s really inhuman of the attacker’s part. Such innocent lives are lost due to their actions! I hope that these wars would end sooner.