Antiwar.com Blog

In addition to our troops who have been killed in this “war of choice,” there is a vast number of casualities who have had to be Medivac’d back to the United States. Here is an excerpt on this topic from the transcript of last night’s CNN “NEWSNIGHT” with Aaron Brown. I ask you take special note of the final comment made by Mr. Brown.

EXCERPT:

BROWN: In a week when we’ve talked a good deal about bad apples in Iraq, it is time to talk of angels. We found these angels on a clunky airplane filled from ceiling to floor with the wounded of the Iraq war. They travel from Iraq to Germany and then on to Washington, the beginnings for many of a very long road back to health. At every mile they travel, they’re watched over and tended to by medics and nurses and doctors who have seen too much to be unchanged by a war that is still just a year old. NEWSNIGHT’s Beth Nissen made the journey with them this week. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Thirteen hundred hours, Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. On approach, the day’s medical evacuation flight from downrange, a C-141 Starlifter bringing in sick and wounded troops from Iraq. CAPT. DAN LEGERE, MEDICAL CREW DIRECTOR: We continuously move patients out of theater. The patients that we see, most of them have trauma of one type or another from their battle injuries.

NISSEN: The war wounded, almost 20 on this flight, are all floated on to buses that will take them to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the big Army hospital nearby. The plane is immediately reconfigured for the next medevac flight to carry another set of sick and wounded troops from Landstuhl to military hospitals in the U.S. for more surgery, treatment, long-term rehab.

SMSGT. RICKY SMITH, PRIMARY LOADMASTER: These kids, they’ve done their job. And it is our job to make sure they get back to medical attention and get put back together, if you will.

NISSEN: Seventeen hundred hours: 37 patients loaded on to the plane for the long flight to the U.S. Their injuries are typical of those carried on medevac flights, especially in the last five weeks, gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, legs and arms fractured in mortar blasts, eyes ruptured by shrapnel. Two patients are in critical condition, both with spinal chord injuries. One is on a ventilator. For the ground and flight crews, seeing so many so badly injured is hard, yet hardens their sense of mission.

LEGERE: A few things that you see will really tug at your heart.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I just sympathize with them so much. And I just want to make sure that we do everything, everything possible for them.

NISSEN: That isn’t easy on board a C-141 cargo plane, an inhospitable flying hospital. The challenges start on takeoff, especially for the critical patients.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The most dramatic thing here is when the airplane takes off and the nose pitches up, the head pitches down and kind of destabilizes things for us when that happens.

NISSEN: Changes in altitude, cabin pressure can cause drops in blood pressure. Turbulence can cause spikes in pain.

MAJ. STEVE GRIFFIN, AIRCRAFT COMMANDER: We try to watch out for it. We keep the smoothest flight that we can for our patients. It is their comfort level we’re concerned about. And we try to make it as comfortable as what we can for them.

NISSEN: Things are far from comfortable for the medical flight crew. Most crew members are Air Force reservists, Air National Guard. In civilian, they are E.R. nurses, EMTs. At 30,000 feet, their work is the same, but working conditions are radically different. The light is dim. Space is cramped. Stethoscopes are useless in the roar of the C-141’s engines.

TECH SGT. TIMOTHY MITZEL, MEDICAL FLIGHT CREW: We all have to wear ear plugs. We can’t hear. We can’t hear blood pressures. We can’t hear lung sounds.

NISSEN: Crew members use monitors, use informal sign language, lean in to listen to patients. For nine hours, they work to control pain, to monitor mortar and bullet wounds.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You’re OK.

NISSEN: To dispense comfort.

LEGERE: The kids that we see, they’ve all got still that great spirit. You don’t ever hear any of them complaining or whining or any of the things that you really would expect seeing the disfiguring and the severe injuries that these guys have.

NISSEN: Twenty-two hundred hours: Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. Patients are off-loaded onto buses bound for Walter Reed Army Medical Center or Bethesda Naval Hospital. It is hard for the flight crew, especially the older ones, to see them go.

GRIFFIN: You don’t look at them as some stranger that is on the other side of the world. You look at them as, wow, this could have been my son or my daughter.

NISSEN: There is little time for reflection. Within hours, the medevac missions go again, back to Germany, back downrange, back home with the latest casualties of war.
(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Since the war began, there have been 3,000 of these flights, 40,000 patients. They haven’t lost one yet.

Please read that again: Mr. Brown noted that 40,000 of our troops were in serious enough condition to be Medivac’d back to the United States from Iraq!

More Iraqi prisoner torture pictures about to be released. Via TalkLeft (who gets it from Drudge), we find that the Washington Post is set to publish some new photos.

Here’s Private Lynndie England again:

In this cropped photograph, Army Pfc. Lynndie England of the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md., holds a leash tied around a naked man’s neck in an Iraqi prison. (Exclusive to The Washington Post)

From the Washington Post Story:

The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man’s neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women’s underwear covers his head and face.

The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS’s “60 Minutes II” and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” that were inflicted on detainees.

Here are all the photos.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael C. Anderson, along with four other soldiers, died in a mortar attack outside of Fallujah. His mother desperately asks:

“What is a builder doing there, staying in a hot spot? He shouldn’t have been there. How do they explain that? . . . I think they’re running out of soldiers.”

Anderson was a part of the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 14, which is based in Jacksonville, Fla., on mission “fixing sewage problems and electrical and water systems in Iraq.” Strange that non-combat Marines would be fixing things in a besieged city that was for a few weeks under American bombardment. Perhaps Anderson’s mother is right. It would explain the recent announcement that 47,000 more troops are headed for Iraq.

And so the US’s descent from the moral pedestal it once occupied is now complete.

The United States walked out of a UN meeting Tuesday to protest its decision minutes later to give Sudan a third term on the Human Rights Commission, the world body’s human rights watchdog.

US Ambassador Sichan Siv called the vote an “absurdity” and accused Sudan of massive human rights violations and “ethnic cleansing” in the western Darfur region.

As Siv walked out of the Economic and Social Council chamber, Sudan’s deputy UN Ambassador Omar Bashir Manis launched into a heated response, accusing American forces of engaging in degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners, using disproportionate force and committing “atrocities” against innocent Iraqi civilians.

But the United States’ seat in the chamber was empty, and no American diplomat was there to hear it.
[…]
“It is yet very ironic that the United States delegation, while shedding crocodile tears over the situation in Darfur … is turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the American forces against the innocent civilian population in Iraq, including women and children,” he said.

Manis also cited “the brutal attacks against innocent civilians in Fallujah where for the first time in our lives we saw live reporting of mass graves — women, children and elderly and other innocent civilians buried in a football stadium” and the “infamous and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison.” So Sudan’s seat on the Human Rights Commission “is not at all different” from the US presence, Manis said.

Well, they do have a point, don’t they? Americans might as well get used to this sort of thing now that the Bushies and neocons have dragged us all through the slime with their reprehensible Iraq invasion and occupation.

From Breaking News.ie:

As President George Bush appeared on Arabic television today in a bid to limit the damage caused by photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, a new image emerged which would shock the world.

A photograph from an internal military report into mistreatment of prisoners, and leaked to a US magazine, showed the battered corpse of a prisoner.

In the picture, obtained by the New Yorker magazine, the dead inmate was wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice.

Another photograph showed an empty room at the Abu Ghraib prison – centre of the scandal – splattered with blood.

The good news from Iraq just keeps rolling in. The left image is the new one. The image on the right was from 60 minutes II.

when not-quite-white terrorists defeated their more civilized occupiers! Aka, Cinco de Mayo.