Week of: |
12:45 PM
Seeing America's losses
In March, Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Roger Cohn wrote of seeing 15 flag-draped coffins "laid out on the concrete floor of a vast hangar at Dover Air Force Base, the military's largest mortuary."
This was in 1983, and my newspaper had given me the somber assignment of covering the arrival of the remains of U.S. Marines killed in Beirut. The photographs and film of those coffins in their stark, airy tomb appeared in every paper and on the evening news; a week later, President Reagan traveled to Camp Lejeune to deliver a moving tribute to the dead.
Until this week, the national media's coverage of the war in Iraq has been without such somber images, thanks to a Pentagon directive banning any coverage of "deceased military personnel" at military bases. But the barrier has now been breached. Early in the week, the Seattle Times published a photo -- taken by a civilian contract employee working at a air cargo terminal in Kuwait -- showing scores of flag-draped coffins filling the interior of a military plane. As we reported yesterday, that employee, Tami Silicio, was prompty fired by the contractor. But now, the Air Force has released about 361 photos strikingly like Silicio's. As in the case described by Cohn, they were all taken at Dover Air Force Base. And, like in 1983, they were on the front page of just about every major U.S. newspaper today.
The photos were released by The Memory Hole, a web site directed by First Amendment activist Russ Kick. Last year, Kick filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Air Force asking for access to such photos. And this week, the Air Force Air Mobility Command decided to grant the request.
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12:35 PM
Importing hope
In the March/April issue of Mother Jones, Julia Whitty tells of making the painful decision to smuggle cancer drugs from Canada to help her ailing father. The reason was simple. In the U.S., the prescription would cost $47,000 a year; purchased overseas, the drugs would cost roughly $1,200 a year. "What would you do? Well, I did it too—and can now add drug smuggling to the dubious accomplishments on my résumé."
But with stories such as Whitty's becoming all too familiar, election-year pressure may force Congress to make such importation legal. This week, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would allow pharmicies and individuals to import cheaper medicine from Canada and eventually from other countries as well.
So, how much would Americans be likely to save thanks to the bill? As a online sidebar to Whitty's piece, we took a look at the price differences for identical drugs purchased in the U.S. and across the border in Canada. So you can see for yourself.
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11:45 AM
Dubya's Florida greenwash
President Bush spent Friday in Florida, touring an Everglades preserve and trying to put a green spin on his dismal environmental record.
How dismal is it? Well, if the administration had its way, the water Bush was wading through on Friday could be a lot less pristine. Last fall, the government argued before the Supreme Court that a Florida waste treatment agency should be able to pump pollutants from a waste canal into the Everglades.
And it isn't only in the Everglades that the Bush administration's clean water policies are posing a threat to Sunshine State water quality. At the other end of the Sunshine state, the fabled Suwannee River is also at risk. As Ted Williams reported in the September/October issue of Mother Jones, the Suwannee is "the least polluted and least obstructed" major American river. But if the White House has its way, that may not the case for too much longer.
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2:35 PM
Inappropriate appropriations
From The Hill newspaper: lawmakers and administration officials "are scurrying to understand whether President Bush siphoned off money appropriated for the war in Afghanistan to pay for preparations for a future Iraqi invasion," as alleged in Bob Woodward's media-hogging Plan of Attack.
Woodward says Bush approved “some 30 projects that would eventually cost $700 million … [and] Congress had not been notified that the Pentagon wanted to reprogram the money.”
Wondering how $700 million goes missing without anyone noticing? It seems lawmakers just didn't ask the obvious questions, as witness Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the ranking member on the Defense Subcommittee, whose vigilance, shall we say, faltered.
On a visit to Qatar, Murtha said he noted a lot of construction activity but did not put two and two together. "I should have figured it out when I saw all that building there. But I didn’t, and they didn’t tell me."
The flap risks doing "lasting damage to the appropriations and oversight process," notes The Hill, and ticks off Congress at a time when the president could use some legislative good will.
Relations between the administration and appropriators over Iraq could be tested before the November election. In response to the administration’s announcement Tuesday that the war in Iraq would cost more than expected, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) introduced a $50 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill yesterday that would cover funding shortfalls expected to occur later this year if the same or more numbers of servicemen remain in Iraq.
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02:36 PM
Oh, how the mighty are fallen!
For years, Iraqi defector and neoconservative darling Dr. Khidir Hamza was a go-to guy if you needed a scary story about Saddam Hussein's nuclear and biological weapons programs. Once one of Saddam's nuclear scientists, Hamza defected in 1994 and, aided by Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began spinning his apocalyptic tales for anyone who would listen. He even wrote a book, Saddam's Bombmaker, which quickly became one of the war party's sacred texts. While plenty of people doubted Hamza's claims, they were good enough for the Bush administration's war planners. Hamza did well for himself, too: when Baghdad fell last year, he landed a cushy job as a top adviser to Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology, where he was partly responsible for overseeing the country's nuclear and military industries.
Last month, though, the Coalition Provisional Authority fired him. Was it because U.S. forces haven't found any evidence to back up Hamza's overheated WMD tales? Maybe, although nobody in Washington has been fired for making false claims, and Ahmed Chalabi is still scheming away in Baghdad, congressional investigations be damned. Instead, as the London Independent's Patrick Cockburn reports, simple incompetence might have done Hamza in:
"It was not a successful appointment, according to sources within the ministry. Dr Hamza seldom turned up for work. He obstructed others from doing their jobs. On 4 March, his contract was not renewed by the CPA. It is now trying to evict him from his house in the heavily guarded 'Green Zone' where the CPA has its headquarters."
No one should worry for Hamza's future, though. As Cockburn notes, "He could not be contacted by the Independent but is believed to have taken up a job with a U.S. company."
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2:20 PM
Coming home: The photo Bush didn't want published
As Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Roger Cohn pointed out in the magazine's March/April issue, "There have been no images of coffins coming home from Iraq."
The Pentagon made sure of that last March, on the eve of the war, when it issued a directive prohibiting media coverage of "deceased military personnel" at any military bases. ... But still the dead keep coming home—513 killed in the Iraq war by late January, 375 of them since the president declared that the war was over.
Take a look at the photo running with this piece in today's Seattle Times and you begin to understand why the Pentagon doesn't want us to see images of coffins coming home. The photo, stark and moving, shows flag-draped coffins containing the bodies of fallen troops being secured inside a cargo plane at Kuwait International Airport. It was taken, on April 7, by Tami Silicio, a contract employee from Seattle who works the night shift at the cargo terminal. She tells the Times,
"The way everyone salutes with such emotion and intensity and respect. The families would be proud to see their sons and daughters saluted like that."
April has been a grim month for U.S. troops. So far, 94 have been killed, bringing the total killed to 707, 569 of them since the president declared the war over last May. Says Silicio,
"So far this month, almost every night we send them home. ... It's tough. Very tough."
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