Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE):
Free Americans Proclaiming Total Emancipation and Working Towards
Democracy. NOTE: Thanks to Graham Jukes for this. -- kl, pp
----- Original Message -----
From: Beth Jezik
To: Eric May ; GRAHAM JUKES
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 4:51 AM
Subject: article by goff and gulf war syndrome....
Gulf War II Syndrome?
Military Equipment and "Pneumonia"
By STAN GOFF
(This article originally appeared in Counterpunch,
www.counterpunch.org - reprinted with permission, Stan Goff)
To understand the official military response to the mysterious
"pneumonia" breaking out among American troops in Iraq, we have to
understand that troops are equipment.
To the unremitting vexation of Donald Rumsfeld and his
"network-centric" techno-groupies, troops are articles of equipment
whose preparation and maintenance prove troublesome. They have to be
coaxed into "service" with Army-of-One-style Madison Avenue pitches
and educational bribes, enculturated to discipline and punctuality,
taught how to perform their various functions, then kept in the job
through a system of economic and psychological rewards. Troops are
the only part of the "tables of organization and equipment" (TO&E is
the military's term to describe its units, not mine) that have to be
indoctrinated.
There are a couple of troublesome aspects to this for the politicians
who control the military. First, troops are not equipment. Second,
indoctrination narratives are perishable as circumstances change.
I tend to harp about this, having been military for so long and now
being a very politically active leftist, but no member of the armed
forces is ever transformed into the unthinking, unfeeling, lethal
robot that thrills the right and haunts the left. These men and women
start and end as human beings exactly like all of us. They experience
the same range of emotions, desire the same outlets for their
creativity, seek the same human companionship, and are driven by the
same intellectual curiosity. They are not computers that can be
programmed. They feel loneliness, awe, pain, lust, confusion, mirth,
dread, appetites, and obsessions just like every last one of us, and
they exist in the same uncontrollable mix of potentially subversive
facts that we do. They are the same combination of goal-directed
willfulness and unmanaged acting-out as the rest of us. They are part
of the same system as you and me, in which Wal-Mart workers and
soldiers are both necessary and expendable. Like the rest of us, they
can also get mad when they find they've been had.
They have to be given a special status, reinforced by popular media,
that equates their subservience to heroism. They are dressed up in
crisp uniforms so they can be properly recognized and adored, and
rewarded with colorful medals and badges that hang like fetishes all
over those uniforms, and convinced that they are serving some sacred
purpose even when they are only slaking Wall Street and the Dollar
with their blood and sweat.
Troops might be bewildered, as we all are, by ideologies of
chauvinism, consumerism, gender, and so on, but they're still exposed
to all that contradictory stuff that life presents them. In fact,
troops are often exposed more directly to the charlatan character of
official horseshit than the rest of us. As middle class white America
comforts itself with the cake-and-ice-cream of 'liberation' in Iraq,
for example, the troops who are the instruments of this wretched
folly are confronted each day with the generalized hostility of an
occupied people, and with the glaring fact that their senior
officers--whom they've been told to trust as leaders--are now
professional hucksters assisting with the sale of war to voters and
taxpayers.
What troops often haven't had yet, and what many don't have until
after their tours of duty, is the epiphany that they are equipment.
Equipment with an expiration date.
The Department of Defense does not care if a soldier retires and dies
three weeks later. In fact, the Veterans Administration bean counters
would see that as positive. The Department of Defense does not care
if a soldier who was getting out anyway, finishes his or her three or
four year hitch, then comes down with mysterious and debilitating
ailments, as long as that ailment can plausibly be denied as
"service-connected." Note how many millions have been spent by the US
government to deny that Gulf War Syndrome existed, and how hard
they've fought liability for Agent Orange.
Now there is a "pneumonia" breaking out among the troops, which may
very well be related to inhalation of microscopic particles of the
highly toxic and radioactive depleted uranium, a heavy-metal slag
used in another bit of expendable military equipment, US anti-tank
ammunition.
The press, as per standing operating procedure, is collaborating with
the Department of Defense in completely evading the possibility of DU
as a causative agent for the respiratory malady that has already
killed two perfectly healthy young men and has dozens of others
hospitalized with some on ventilators. CNN's medical reporter, Dr.
Sanjay Gupta, has made the claim that the morbidity rate is average
for the population, a claim copied directly from the Defense
Department playbook. This idiotic assertion, of course, accepts the
premise that this is one of the communicable pneumonias we all know
and love, in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. There are no
disease clusters to indicate that an organism is responsible for the
problem at all, but this doesn't stop the spin machine.
Two of the over 100 cases have shown strep, and this is boldly
emphasized while the fact that ONLY two have shown strep (which could
very well be coincidental or opportunistic infections) is
underplayed. And the boilerplate pre-emptive argument against toxic
exposure as the source of this outbreak is that there is "no evidence
of toxic or chemical exposure." What is not stated is that when the
most obvious etiology is deliberately overlooked, the "evidence" is
unlikely to appear on its own. The military made its mind up some
time ago that DU is not toxic or carcinogenic--flying directly in the
face of scientific fact as effortlessly as the military's political
bosses stated the bogus case of al Qaeda-Iraq connections and WMD's.
The target audience for this kind of chicanery is generally the US
civilian population, but in this case it is also the troops
themselves. They cannot be allowed to develop a preoccupation about
the very dust they are relentlessly exposed to every day, because
that might degrade their ability to perform their primary functions.
Whether or not this deadly inflammation is the result of DU or some
other environmental hazard, the troops are being exposed to DU and a
lot more nasty shit every day, just like the troops from Desert Storm
and its aftermath, and they will likely eventually be disabled at
more or less the same rates--that would be upwards of 40 percent.
Troops have become a target audience for the pneumonia spin, because
their expiration dates are any time after Uncle Sam can extricate
himself from this tar baby he has encountered in Iraq. Until then,
just to cope with this arrogant overreach, Bushfeld is offering
bribes all over the world for spare troops and activating the
Individual Ready Reserve--a measure normally associated with direct
defense of the nation or general war.
In March the sandstorms dead-lined their helicopters. Now something
is dead-lining the troops. But the troops are NOT equipment, in spite
of what Donald Rumsfeld and his whole techno-fascist entourage might
like. We can tell them--and I am telling them--you are being had.
-------------
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the
US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming
book "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a
member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired
Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty
soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org