Allah song by Maha Kavi Barathiyar

June 16, 2013 4:42 pm

The wartime horror inflicted on Vietnam

Review by Borzou Daragahi

A meticulously researched account of the cruelty of US troops to Vietnamese civilians raises questions for today’s conflicts

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse, Metropolitan (RRP£18.99, RRP$30)

One atrocity among the many recounted in Nick Turse’s searing and meticulously documented book about US conduct during the Vietnam war stands out for the gratuitous cruelty of the troops in their day-to-day interactions with often defenceless civilians.

In rural Quang Nam province in June 1966, four unarmed local people approached a group of Marines in an attempt to retrieve the body of an elderly man killed the day before by US troops. They wore white, carried a white flag bearing a red cross and brought a letter of introduction in English from an official of the pro-US south Vietnamese government. The troops blindfolded them, destroyed the letter and flag and ordered them to leave. Once they were about 40 metres away, the soldiers opened fire, killing two and wounding a third.

This account was among hundreds Turse found in 2001 while in Washington researching a doctoral thesis on post-traumatic stress order. He stumbled upon boxes full of forgotten archives from the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a once-secret US military project launched to document alleged American atrocities in order to keep them quiet.

Turse copied about a third of the documents before they were removed from public view the following year. Their accounts of civilian massacres, rapes and torture form the core of his book, which includes interviews with soldiers involved as well as victims and witnesses.

The book is a damning account of the horrors the US inflicted on civilians in its failed quest to keep Vietnam’s south from falling to the communist north. But rather than single out a few bad apples, such as those tried and sentenced for the My Lai massacre, Turse aims to identify policy decisions and a military culture that led to what he describes as systematic, flagrant disregard for the lives and rights of Vietnamese people.

Despite America dropping more bombs on the north than it used in all of the second world war, the greatest victims of US firepower, and by the far the largest percentage of people killed, were the same civilians the US was ostensibly attempting to liberate. According to Turse, My Lai was but one of many such massacres in the south Vietnamese countryside; it seems every other village in certain provinces has erected a monument detailing US atrocities.

Students and contemporaries of the war recall “kill counts” and“free-fire zones” that were part of US tactics against guerrillas in the south. “Kill anything that moves” was a phrase that came up repeatedly in the case files and soldiers’ recollections of their orders, epitomising a mindset that devalued Vietnamese life.

In 1968, the US army paid Vietnamese families about $33 for each adult civilian killed unintentionally, half that for each child. MGR, an acronym commonly used by soldiers, stood for the “mere gook rule”, hinting that no American would ever be punished for killing any Vietnamese.

The book zeroes in on the consequences of granting young men, deprived of sleep and creature comforts while heavily armed, wide latitude to pursue murky policy objectives against an elusive foe in a foreign land. Civilians navigating constantly changing rules of engagement to which they were not privy found little escape from the onslaught. Displaced peasants, terrified by bombing and“rural pacification” campaigns, descended on cities or squalid camps, only to be shot by soldiers. In detention centres, beatings and torture were common – including against pregnant women and the elderly, such as the 86-year-old grandmother beaten “mercilessly” by US Special Forces.

Whistleblowers were frequently left to twist in the wind, ignored, reassigned for speaking out or even – a fact that has echoes in today’s National Security Agency scandal – placed under investigation. Even those convicted rarely received more than a slap on the wrist.

The writing at times fails to measure up to the powerful underlying research. A project that took a decade to research would have benefited from a few more months of literary tweaks. Nevertheless, as Turse himself occasionally notes, the stark, cool bureaucratic language in the accounts adds to the impact of the brutality.

The question for many readers will be how much has changed. Is the spectre of ultra-violence against civilians yet to be exorcised? Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have displayed shades of the conduct recounted here, perpetrating atrocities that suggest disregard for foreign lives. But rarely with such impunity and not on the scale of what the author depicts in an era before the proliferation of real-time satellite and internet communications technology made covering up such crimes nearly impossible.

The reviewer is a north Africa correspondent for the Financial Times

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... But Iraqis don't have that choice...

We've moved on from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice

Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country in ruins

John Pilger

The Guardian, Sunday 26 May 2013 18.00 BST

Iraq's ministry of social affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."

Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many hadneuroblastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess".

The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. "This means a horrific 14% of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective".

These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?

www.johnpilger.com

•This article was amended on 27 May 2013. The original referred to the A-10 Warthog aircraft as the A-10 Warhog.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/26/iraqis-cant-turn-backs-on-deadly-legacy#

 

"Second Period of Islamic Power"

"Second Period of Islamic Power"

Interview with God

Dear friends

An inspiring video presentation.


http://www.theinterviewwithgod.com/popup-frame.html--

Fidhaullah Khan

To Eat or Not To Eat Pork

To Eat or Not To Eat Pork

Researched and written by:

Dr Mohamed Rafick Khan bin Abdul Rahman

From an economic perspective it is better to rear pigs than cows or goat. It is simply more profitable. The pregnancy duration is about 112-115 days compared to goat which is about 150 days or a cow 290 days. At the end of each pregnancy the pig produces between 12- 15 piglets, the goat about 1-2 kids and the cow 1 calf. I have been following the story of the construction of a centralized and modern pig farm in Kampung Tumbuk in Kuala Langat and how the issue of religious sensitivity and racial cards has been played by the Opposition (i.e. The BN people) in Selangor. The issue also appears to have been made worst by the lopsided reporting by the Malay newspaper which obviously is trying to incite racial sentiments. Please allow me to share my views as a Muslim on the matter.

The religion perspective of pork. From the bible Both the Bible and the Quran prohibit the eating of pork. Muslims are aware of this prohibition and observe it strictly. However, most readers of the Bible say they do not know where they can find this in the Bible. In the book of Leviticus, chapter 11, v. 7, it is recorded that God declares the pig to be unclean for believers. Then, in verse 8, God says: "You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you". This command is repeated in Deuteronomy 14:7-8. Then, in Isaiah 65:2-4, and 66:17, God issues a stern warning against those who eat pork. Some Christians are aware of this prohibition from God, but they say that they can eat pork because St. Paul said that all food is clean in his letter to the Romans 14:20. St. Paul said this because he believed (as he wrote in his letter to the Ephesians 2:14-15) that Jesus had abolished the Law with all its commandments and regulations. He seems, however, to have misunderstood what he heard about Jesus. In the Gospel According to Matthew 5:17-20, Jesus is reported to have said quite the contrary, as follows: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law . . . ." Jesus then went on in that passage (in verse 19) to denounce anyone who would break the smallest commandment and teach others likewise. He also praised his true followers who will practice and teach even the smallest commandment. One of the commandments, as we have seen, is to stay away from pork. This is why the true followers of Jesus, holding on to his teachings, did not let unclean food such as pork enter their mouths, so that Peter, the chief disciple, can say, "I have never eaten anything impure or unclean" (Acts of the Apostles, ch. 10, v. 14) Five chapters later in the Acts of the Apostles, 15:29, we find that the original disciples still differentiate between clean and unclean foods, and this time Paul is in agreement with them. Six chapters later, in ch. 21, v. 25, their decision to impose food regulations on believers is mentioned without regret, and this time Paul is challenged to prove that he is in agreement with them; and he demonstrated his full agreement with them. What remains, then, is that Jesus, on whom be peace, upheld the prohibition against pork. His disciples also upheld it, and so must all his followers. Those who fail to uphold it need to be informed and reminded of this rule from God. For the same argument many orthodox Jews don't eat pork. Islamic perspective In Islam, the eating of swine is forbidden. This is clearly demonstrated in many verses of the Quran. Among others this includes: [1] 5:3, 6:145, 16:114-115; [2] 2:168-169, 3:93-94, 6:119, 10:59; [3] 5:90-91. My research has failed to find any evidence that suggest that the religion do not allow muslims to be standing next to or to look at or to smell a pig. Maybe some people in authority can highlight further on this issue. The Scientific perspective Dr. E. Kazim. M.D. in his article "Medical aspects of forbidden foods in Islam" (July 1981 issue of Muslim Journal has described diseases carried or caused by the flesh of the swine. He wrote: The pig is a scavenger. It is an omnivorous animal. It eats everything. There are many diseases carried from swine to man, particularly parasite infestations. Lately extensive research has been focused on senility-old age is characterized by hardening of inner lining of the blood vessels of the heart; brain etc. a process called atherosclerosis. When a clot forms, it results in coronary thrombosis or a heart attack, cerebral thrombosis or stroke. Different dietary factors are responsible for atherosclerosis. Gross atheroma may be produced in rabbit by feeding it with cholesterol, but when you add lard (derived from hog fat) to the cholesterol, the incidence of atheroma is increased and thus you would produce coronary thrombosis, and myocardial infraction. Besides, lard contains 2800 units of vitamin D per 100 grams and no vitamin A at all. Lately vitamin D has been held responsible for atheroma, by causing increased absorption of calcium in the blood vessels. In human beings, serum cholesterol is not dependent on the intake of cholesterol in the diet, but depends upon the proportion of animal fats in the diet, which elevates the beta-lipo protein level in the blood. Animal fats contain saturated fatty acids and these saturated fatty acids have been found to be as one of the causes of atheroma in man. Medium fat bacon contains 25% proteins and 55% fat. According to medical research, the fat content in pork is more than any other meat (beef, mutton etc.) and it takes longer to digest. Dr. M Jaffer in an article in the Islamic Review (London) of January 1997 issue has listed 16 kinds of harmful germs, which have been discovered in pork in modern researches and the diseases, which could be caused by them. The number of patients suffering from tapeworm disease is the highest in the world among pork eating nations. Other diseases attributed to pigs are caused by tri-chinelia spirates and intestinal worms occupy first place among such nations too. Dr. Glen Shepherd wrote the following on the dangers of eating pork in Washington Post (31 May 1952). "One in six people in USA and Canada have germs in their muscles - trichinosis 8 from eating pork infected with trichina worms. Many people who are infected shows no symptoms. Most of those, who do have, recover slowly. Some die; some are reduced to permanent invalids. All were careless pork caters". He continued "No one is immune from the disease and there is no cure. Neither antibiotics nor drugs or vaccines affect these tiny deadly worms. Preventing infection is the real answer." The Babi and the narrow minded politicians who called themselves Muslims. First of all, I am appalled at the narrow minded politicians who made the issue of building a centralized and modern pig farming an issue. It is beyond doubt that the real issue here is economy, environmental pollution and improving quality of life in the surrounding community. The opposition (BN) are making a mockery of this just because of political mileage. I feel when something good is being done; it should promoted by all parties. I have travelled to St Louis , USA where it is also known capital pork of the world. I have visited and stand 3 feet away from a pig pen. There was no smell. It was so clean. It is even cleaner than most public toilets in Malaysia . How many of this politician has visited such a farm and how many are involved in goat farming in Malaysia . While goat is Halal in Malaysia , please enter many farms there is in Malaysia and you will see how dirty it is. Islam only prohibits the eating of pork. There is no prohibition of looking at eat or standing next to one. In fact I have yet to find anywhere in the Quran that prevent Muslims from rearing it. During my 15 months tour of duty with UN in Cambodia, many Malay Champa who are strong Muslims rear pigs under their house for economic reason even though they don't eat them. From an economic perspective it is better to rear pigs than cows or goat. It is simply more profitable. The pregnancy duration is about 112-115 days compared to goat which is about 150 days or a cow 290 days. At the end of each pregnancy the pig produces between 12- 15 piglets, the goat about 1-2 kids and the cow 1 calf. From an environmental perspective, it is definitely better to have a central farm where small farmers join hands and run one big and clean farm. This way the cleanliness of our water way will be maintained. Waste management will become the epicentre of the operation. It is more economical to run one big farm than many small farms that is polluting. Overall it is a win win situation for everyone. It is insulting the way some politician look at the issue. I believe from Islamic perspective it is quite clear. It is the narrow minded politicians that played up the issue that makes it into a Muslim and non Muslim issue and trying to create a bigger racial divide among Malaysians. Sometimes I wonder, which has the lower image , the babi or these politicians. For that aspect, I respect the position taken by PAS on this matter. It has shown that it has handled the issues properly. I ask all level minded Malaysian and to re look at the "Babi" issue again. Study the real issue properly and make a proper judgment. Overall it will benefit Malaysian from the economic, environmental and quality of life perspective. Researched and written by: Dr Mohamed Rafick Khan bin Abdul Rahman

Electronic Quran

Quran - Electronic, complete with meaning and with sound
A Forwarded Ramadhan gift to you,
What an amazing site. It is an electronic Quran complete with meanings & with sound. You can access any chapter & any Sura from the drop down menus & also hear the recitation of the Suras' with the translation. Click on the "Play" button for sound (>)This is an ideal way to learn & teach your children the Quran. Today they have no time or mind to sit down and learn the quran, Give them some thing electronic, they will be interested. Please enjoy it & share it with others.Go here - http://www.quranexplorer.com/quran/May Allah also bless all those who kept forwarding this link and made it available for us.