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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan B. who wrote (458651)	9/14/2003 8:42:10 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Dan, I'm astonished that you think I'm trying to lie about Bush. All the evidence points to the fact that the government is lying to you and me. Here's another example of how the Bushies and the Pentagon are attempting to keep the truth from you: America's Hidden Battlefield Toll truthout.org Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York The Observer Sunday 14 September 2003 New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously. The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping. The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'. Three US soldiers were killed last week, bringing the number of combat dead since hostilities in Iraq were declared officially over on 1 May to 68. A similar number have died in accidents. It is military police policy to announce that a soldier has been wounded only if they were involved in an incident that involved a death. Critics of the policy say it hides the true extent of the casualties. The new figures reveal that 1,178 American soldiers have been wounded in combat operations since the war began on 20 March. It is believed many of the American casualties evacuated from Iraq are seriously injured. Modern body armour, worn by almost all American troops, means wounds that would normally kill a man are avoided. However vulnerable arms and legs are affected badly. This has boosted the proportion of maimed among the injured. There are also concerns that many men serving in Iraq will suffer psychological trauma. Experts at the National Army Museum in London said studies of soldiers in the First and Second World Wars showed that it was prolonged exposure to combat environments that was most damaging. Some American units, such as the Fourth Infantry Division, have been involved in frontline operations for more than six months. Andrew Robertshaw, an expert at the museum, said wars also claimed casualties after they were over. 'Soldiers were dying from injuries sustained during World War I well into the 1920s,' he said. British soldiers are rotated more frequently than their American counterparts. The Ministry of Defence has recently consulted the National Army Museum about psychological disorders suffered by combatants in previous wars in a bid to avoid problems. The wounded return to the USA with little publicity. Giant C-17 transport jets on medical evacuation missions land at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, every night. Battlefield casualties are first treated at Army field hospitals in Iraq then sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany, where they are stabilised. Andrews is the first stop back home. As the planes taxi to a halt, gangplanks are lowered and the wounded are carried or walk out. A fleet of ambulances and buses meet the C-17s most nights to take off the most seriously wounded. Those requiring urgent operations and amputations are ferried to America's two best military hospitals, the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, near Washington, and the National Naval Medical Centre, Bethesda. The hospitals are busy. Sometimes all 40 of Walter Reed's intensive care beds are full. Dealing with the aftermath of amputations and blast injuries is common. Mines, home-made bombs and rocket-propelled grenades are the weapons of choice of the Iraqi resistance fighters. They cause the sort of wounds that will cost a soldier a limb. The less badly wounded stay overnight at the air base, where an indoor tennis club and a community centre have been turned into a medical staging facility. Many have little but the ragged uniforms on their backs. A local volunteer group, called America's Heroes of Freedom, has set up on the base to provide them with fresh clothes, food packages and toiletries. 'This is our way of saying, "We have not forgotten you,"' said group founder Susan Brewer.

To: Dan B. who wrote (458651)	9/14/2003 8:43:35 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Kiss Your Liberties Goodbye: truthout.org Liberty Bushwhacked Washington Post \| Editorial Saturday 13 September 2003 President Bush asked Congress this week to "untie the hands of our law enforcement officials" by passing three new counterterrorism proposals. Two of these are relatively insignificant, but one is dramatically dangerous -- and it has received little attention. Mr. Bush wants Congress to give federal investigators the power to compel witnesses to submit to secret interrogations without the traditional protections of the grand jury. In more technical terms, Mr. Bush wants to give the Justice Department the power to issue "administrative subpoenas" instead of grand jury subpoenas to compel documents or testimony from reluctant witnesses. The administration argues that grand jury subpoenas can be too slow in emergency situations. The administrative approach, Mr. Bush said, is faster and already "used in a wide range of criminal and civil matters. . . . If we can use these subpoenas to catch crooked doctors, the Congress should allow law enforcement officials to use them in catching terrorists." That may sound reasonable, and current law does permit investigators in certain types of cases to use administrative subpoenas, which FBI agents can issue with far less oversight. But until now there have been important limits to administrative subpoena power. While ivestigators can use an administrative subpoena to obtain documents, they cannot normally compel testimony in criminal cases. The exception is a provision of federal drug law on which the Bush proposal, contained in a bill introduced this week by Rep. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), is modeled. Yet even there, prosecutors generally use the power to obtain records, not testimony, law enforcement experts say. In this country, in other words, if you don't want to talk to the FBI, you don't have to -- and the only way the Justice Department can force you to talk is to put you in front of 23 of your fellow citizens with a court stenographer making a detailed transcript. All of this significantly deters abuse. Under Mr. Feeney's bill, the bureau in terrorism cases could subpoena a witness and, if that person balks, get the courts to "compel compliance" on pain of contempt. So, absent an assertion of a privilege, you could no longer refuse to talk to investigators without the protections of a grand jury. Moreover, the bill would give the department the authority, if it certifies that "a danger to national security" would result from disclosure of the subpoena, to slap a gag order on the witness. This is entirely at odds with traditional grand jury procedure, in which witnesses are specifically exempted from the secrecy that surrounds proceedings. And unlike in the drug context, there's reason to fear that this authority would be used routinely in the context of terrorism. This radical new power is unnecessary as well as dangerous. It's not as though seeking grand jury subpoenas is especially burdensome. Prosecutors don't need to seek a grand jury's approval for each subpoena they issue; rather, they often issue them on behalf of the grand juries. Federal rules allow them to keep signed and sealed blank subpoenas for use when necessary. While it is probably true that getting grand jury subpoenas out the door is more cumbersome in certain jurisdictions than in others, that would at most suggest tinkering with some local rules and practices. Mr. Feeney's bill would do a lot more than tinker. Asked to account for the extraordinary power proposed in the bill, a department spokeswoman initially suggested that Mr. Feeney may have drafted it badly. Only when it was pointed out that similar language had appeared in the so-called "Patriot II" draft bill the Justice Department prepared and leaked early this year did the department even acknowledge that it supports this bill as written. We hope Congress will take a different view.