Iraq War Veteran Critically Injured at Occupy Oakland
26 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
in Iraq Veterans Against the War, Occupy Oakland, Veterans for Peace, Wall Street
I was sickened to learn that a young Iraq war veteran was in critical condition last night, with a fractured skull and brain swelling, after being hit by a tear gas canister in an assault by the Oakland Police Department on peaceful Occupy Oakland protesters.
According to The Guardian, 24-year-old Scott Olsen, seen at the end of the video above as fellow protesters carry him away and frantically call for a medic, did two tours of duty in Iraq. Olsen is a member of both the Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War, and I noticed a Veterans for Peace flag as well as the fact that Olsen was wearing a t-shirt with their logo, and the group was standing near the cops.
What happened gets even more disturbing, however. Keith Shannon, one of his friends who served with him in Iraq, mentions he has seen “ the video footage showing Olsen lying on the floor as a police officer throws an explosive device near him.” As you can see in the footage below, the police officer is throwing the explosive into the crowd of people coming to Olsen’s aid. Truly outrageous, and there can be no excuse for this, even if they claim the original injury was accidental.
Another horrifying image, from Occupy Together‘s Facebook page is of a woman in a wheelchair trying to escape the tear gas:
Woman in Wheelchair, Trying to Escape Tear Gas in Oakland
MoveOn has an online action to the Mayor of Oakland in protest:
http://civic.moveon.org/oaklandpolice/?rc=c4_oaklandpolice_letter.fb.v2.g1
MoveOn also posted a link to a great video about what the protests are all about:
Wall Street still isn’t finished with trying to pass off their bad investments on American taxpayers. Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi reports about Bank of America’s attempt to shift risky investments to FDIC insured accounts in his article Occupy Wall Street: Washington Still Doesn’t Get It:
Bank of America is shifting a huge collection of Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts onto its own federally-insured balance sheet. This move of risky instruments off the uninsured Merrill balance sheet onto the commercial bank’s balance sheet was done to prevent Bank of America’s creditors from attacking the firm with collateral calls and other sorties. Essentially, an irresponsible debtor, B of A, is keeping a loan shark from breaking his legs by getting his rich parents to co-sign his loan. The parents in this metaphor would be the FDIC.
The FDIC naturally is not pleased with this development, but the Fed, the supreme banking regulator, is apparently encouraging this move. Here’s how Bloomberg characterized this move:
In short, the Fed’s priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC’s insurance fund.
Risks for FDIC’s insurance fund. Think about that a bit. That’s the fund that protects our savings and checking deposits. Would you let your savings be used to bankroll gambling? Yet, that’s what we’re doing if we cover derivatives, otherwise known as futures – gambling on the future worth of something like stocks or farm commodities (pork bellies, anyone?). Its fine if you chose to invest and know the risks, but that is not what safe savings and checking accounts are supposed to be all about. All this making it safe for Bank of America, because, if it all goes bad, well. . .we can’t let FDIC fail, can we, and take all Americans’ savings?
Taibbi also reports:
Barack Obama is apparently expressing willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in exchange for support for his jobs program. Business leaders are balking at creating new jobs unless Obama makes compliance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued at under $1 billion.
Here’s how to translate this move: companies are saying they can’t attract investment unless they can hide their financials from investors.
Doesn’t seem like life is too good for the investors, even, if we let Wall Street have its way.
Seattle’s Winter Soldier Hearings
08 Jun 2008 2 Comments
in Iraq Veterans Against the War, Iraq War, Peace, Protests, Seattle, Veterans for Peace, Winter Soldier
What struck me most about the testimony I heard last week’s Winter Soldier hearing at Town Hall was not so much that I’ve heard it before, but the sinking feeling of hearing it all again, with a younger generation of vets.
I found it much more disturbing, and was surprised by that (and I actually missed much of the testimony, running late because my health was acting up again). I think maybe it was the rawness of seeing young veterans and soldiers just back, talking about what’s still going on.
Real Change published a good article on the hearings this week. One of the young men describes how what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission of his first tour turned out to be mostly about harassing people. Then shortly into his second deployment, a roadside bomb killed several officers in his platoon, and “the rules of engagement changed from disarming civilians to killing them.”
“Pretty much all we did was just go out on the town and search for people to shoot,” Kochergin said. “Later on, we had no rules of engagement at all. It was go out there and if you see something that you think is not right, take ‘em out.”
Another veteran described how “American soldiers rip Iraqi men from their homes and families, often based on a tip from a neighbor seeking a payoff from the U.S. military.” Now think about that. Imagine what it would be like if someone who didn’t like you could not only turn you in and have you put in detention and tortured, but could also get paid for it.
• Joshua Simpson: “People know that the U.S. has a military that will pay for people to give information to us, [but it’s] the names of people [that] don’t have anything to do with terrorist attacks or the insurgency. It’s people they dislike or something, a neighbor who had a feud with them – sometimes just random people. And this would be the basis of the raids that we would do.”
Nor are our troops or their families immune from the damage of this war:
About a third of those returning suffer from either PTSD or major depression, he said, with up to 20 percent struggling with the loss of function from a traumatic brain injury brought on by constant exposure to blasts in Iraq. At that rate, out of the 1.6 million military personnel deployed to Iraq, Kanter estimated a total of 300,000 to 400,000 “psychiatric casualties” will be coming home, out of which 18 veterans a day are already committing suicide – the highest rate ever recorded, he said.
The result for families, said Tracy Manzel, who spoke on the panel with her husband Seth, is domestic violence, broken marriages and, in one case she cited, a wife murdered by a husband in Seth’s unit. “The Bush Administration talks of family values and how much these values are attacked, but really what the administration is doing is splitting families apart,” she said.
Racism is, sadly, not dead in the U.S. military, as reported in the Seattle PI article on the hearings:
Many said they went to Iraq hoping to help civilians, but found that often wasn’t the case. U.S. troops frequently referred to all Iraqis and Middle Easterners as “hajji,” an ethnic slur. In medical units, they became “range balls,” meaning they were like the golf balls hit on driving ranges that are of low value and that you don’t mind losing.
Sexism isn’t either. One of the people who testified at the hearing was the mother of a young woman still in Iraq (though it sounds like, at least, with a different unit now) who suffered from “command rape.” It’s so common, there’s a name for it. Her daughter told her that the prevalent attitude in the military is that women in uniform are all either “bitches, dykes or whores.,” and didn’t know what to do.
There was a second panel on GI resistance (which is sprouting up, just as it did during the Vietnam War), including a film from those who have fled to Canada.
After the hearing, we all marched, down from Town Hall to Westlake, via Pike Place Market. I just wished there were more of us, more of us marching. There actually are more people against the war than when we held the biggest marches before it happened (I was remembering Seattle Center packed at the start of one of them as I walked through the grounds the other day).
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