President Obama and the First Lady Speak to Troops at Fort Bragg

by Glynn Wilson

Bush’s illegal and ill-fated war in Iraq is finally over. All of the U.S. troops are coming home after eight long years.

It was the longest war in American history, although the news media is not covering the war’s end as much as it did the “Shock and Awe” campaign that started it all on March 20, 2003.

President Barack Obama marked the occasion in a low-key, solemn fashion, by saluting the troops upon their return at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but with “little fanfare,” according to the AP headline.

The wire service did report that Obama never tried to declare victory in this war, as Bush did with a “Mission Accomplished” banner aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Although it is doubtful that story made the front page of many newspapers or the top 10 minutes of many local news broadcasts in this country. It is a war we wish would just go away quietly, and for good reasons. It was started under faulty pretenses based on bad intelligence about a non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction program on the part of Saddam Hussein.

“It was a war that (Obama) opposed from the start, inherited as president and is now bringing to a close, leaving behind an Iraq still struggling,” the wire service reported.

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The Op-Critical Band is back with a take on the Roger Waters classic “Another Brick in the Wall” medley. This version is called “Another Name on the Wall” and features awesome animation effects from the very artistic mind of Matt Brown, and collaborates with Gillian Brown and Sophia Fraser for some great artistic effects and style that is very original.

This is a song against wars, and the propaganda and monuments that people use to promote and start wars.

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Full text of president’s remarks below…
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More Americans believe history will judge the Iraq war as a failure rather than a success by a rate of 53 percent to 42, according to the most recent Gallup poll on the subject.

These views have varied little over the past few years even as Americans have become more positive in their assessments of how the war is going, according to Gallup.

To a large degree, Americans’ predictions on how history will judge the war mirror their basic support for the war — 55 percent say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, while 41 percent disagree. War opposition has eased only slightly in recent years from a high of 63 percent in April 2008.

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An elite division of Blackwater plans targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.

And everyone’s denying it.

Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan Revealed

What does it profit a country to gain the whole world, yet lose its soul?

Could news about the Iraq War really get even worse?

The owner of U.S. contractor Blackwater was a Christian zealot hell-bent on wiping Muslims from the earth. When facing an investigation, he ordered the murder of witnesses.

That’s corporate America and the military industrial complex for you. Yea, we are such a moral country and an example to the world. No wonder the entire world loved George W. Bush so much…

Do you think they were fun to sit down and have a beer with?

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

Isn’t that one reason we like living here? Er, not if your name is Bush or Rumsfeld…

Rumsfeld’s Worldwide Intelligence Update, a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president, mixed Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, GQ magazine has revealed.

Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld Will Be Judged

Survivor Corps Supports Returning Troops and Their Families

Guest Column
by Dani Sevilla
SurvivorCorps.Org

Within the United States there are over one and a half million service members that have served in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 30,000 have been physically wounded, but many more have experienced less visible, psychological wounds.

Traumatic Brain Injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder have emerged as signature injuries of these conflicts, with recent reports suggesting an increase in rates of suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence among returning service members and veterans.

These traumatic affects of conflict, left unaddressed, could have far-reaching negative consequences for the individuals affected, their families, and our country. Survivor Corps’ work in some of the most conflict affected countries in the world has shown community reintegration to be the key factor in those that overcome their traumatic experiences, and those that are consumed by them.

Operation Survivor

Ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are creating a generation of veterans in the United States from all branches of the armed services and all 50 states who are struggling to overcome physical and psychosocial injuries. Most combat veterans convalescing in military hospitals across the country will survive physically, but getting on with their lives after returning home to their families and communities is proving a significant challenge for hundreds of thousands.

Among the 1.6 million who have served since 2001, suicide is on the rise, as is unemployment and incidents of substance abuse and domestic violence.

The successful reintegration of returning service members is an issue that will have a long-lasting impact on American society, and may become the single defining struggle facing this new generation of veterans.

Survivor Corps and its partners are determined to avoid the mistakes made when veterans returned from Vietnam, which resulted in tens of thousands of post-war suicides and over 200,000 men and women living on the streets.

To head off this tragic outcome, Survivor Corps will build peer support programs at the community level that will bring service members and veterans together for mutual support and encourage both individual responsibility and collective action to help others in need.

Survivor Corps is offering an alternative “treatment” that can be made readily available in all communities, regardless of proximity to traditional military or government centers of support. Our approach is nimble enough to address the needs of individual survivors, while still broad enough to build a coalition of survivors and service providers working to effect long-term positive change.

This new program will help the recovery and reintegration of hundreds of thousands of returning U.S. service members at a critical time for them and their country.

Click Here to read more about Operation Survivor