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Author: TriSec    Date: 12/11/2007 11:40:10

Good Morning.

Today is our 1,728th day in Iraq.

We'll start this morning as we always do, with the latest casualty figures courtesy of Antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 3887
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 3748
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 3427
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3028
Since Election (1/31/05): 2450

Other Coalition Troops: 306
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 469



We find today's cost of war standing at:

$ 476, 075, 050, 000.00


and for comparison's sake, I ran across this tidbit last night on a WWII trivia site:
From 1941 to 1945, a total of 17,955,000 Americans were medically examined for induction into the armed forces. Some 6,420,000 (35.8 percent) were rejected as unfit because of some physical disability. Altogether, 16,112,566 Americans served their country in World War 11. A total of 38.8 percent (6,332,000) were volunteers. In all, 405,399 American service men and women gave up their lives in a war that cost the US $288 Billion Dollars.




Turning not to our troops this morning, but their civilian counterparts, I heard on MSNBC last night about a new scandal breaking within the Halliburton/KBR corps. How's gang-raping a fellow American sound?
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers. (continued...)



As the US continues its descent, folks around the world are starting to notice. No less a light then Bishop Desmont Tutu has weighed in...and he's called our treatment of detainees akin to apartheid. Remember when we used to fight against this? One of my first political acts was a years-long boycott of Shell gasoline back in the 80s.
ARCHBISHOP Desmond Tutu has accused the United States and Britain of pursuing policies like those of South Africa's apartheid-era government by detaining terrorism suspects without trial.

At an event to commemorate the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNDR) today, the Nobel laureate said the detention of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a "huge blot on a democracy".

"Whoever imagined that you would hear from the United States and from Britain the same arguments for detention without trial that were used by the apartheid government," Archbishop Tutu said.

Archbishop Tutu is chairman of the Elders, a group of prominent international statesmen that includes former US president Jimmy Carter, anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela and his Mozambican-born wife, Graca Machel.

The group is spearheading a campaign to get one billion people to sign a pledge reaffirming the principles of the UNDR, passed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

Archbishop Tutu, who helped lead the struggle to overthrow white minority rule in South Africa, said he was surprised so many Americans had accepted the argument that the Guantanamo detentions were necessary because of national security.

"It is exactly what the apartheid government used to say here," the Anglican cleric said.

His remarks come amid a growing outcry over alleged abuses at Guantanamo, which was used as a mass detention centre for suspected violent Islamic radicals in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

Critics have said the US is circumventing international law by holding detainees without charge, often for years, and violated their human rights with forced confessions and torture tactics.

President George W. Bush said the detentions are lawful, humane and necessary as part of its fight against extremists in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.




There's a lot to think about today...but let's not forget the troops, either. I believe tonight is the 7th night of Hannukah, and Christmas and Kwanzaa are right around the corner. It's not too late to send an email to a homesick soldier overseas.

I'll see you inside!
 

187 comments (Latest Comment: 12/12/2007 02:53:53 by livingonli)
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