by Frida Berrigan
The Progressive

JEREMY HINZMAN JOINED THE MILITARY in early 2001. Like many others, he was attracted to the military by “the prospect of being able to ….go to college without incurring debt and be a part of something bigger than myself,” he says.

He completed basic training, and in July 2001 moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with his wife, Nga Nguyen. He was a “White Devil”: a member of the 82nd Airborne’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

But during basic training, he began to have doubts.

Hattim and his family. (Dahr Jamail)

The dump is a dusty wasteland. Heaps of Baghdad’s rotting wastes are strewn about several square miles of the battered capital city. Engaged in their futile battle to remove the endless amounts of garbage from streets, blue garbage trucks rumble through the stinky dump, adding their loads of filth.

32 year-old Hattim lives in this wasteland with his family.

December 27
By IRINnews.org
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Residents of Fallujah, devastated by a heavy US-led attack in November, are gradually beginning to return to their homes. But for the vast majority there is little left to go back to.

Since getting the go-ahead from coalition forces on 23 December to return to the city, nearly 4,000 residents who were displaced by the fighting have returned to their homes.

By Mike Ferner

He trolled for teenagers in North Carolina high schools, barked orders at recruits in boot camp, and pulled charred civilian corpses out of cars in Iraq. Now Jimmy Massey is making good on his promise to tell the whole world what he learned as a Marine.

For the first 10 years, Massey loved being in the USMC. With a quick mind and an easy manner, he and his superiors knew he’d make a great recruiter. And by the luck of the draw, he was assigned to the area around Asheville, N.C., not far from where he grew up.

“It was an advantage being a recruiter in this area. I understand the mentality of mountain people. When we’d talk about topics like the economy and industry around here, I knew what people were talking about. And too, people here usually don’t open up to strangers.”

By Chuck Quilty

“Few of us,” wrote the playwright, Arthur Miller, “can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”

The United States is attempting to scapegoat the United Nations for alleged irregularities in the Oil-for-Food program which allowed Saddam Hussein to skirt the sanctions against Iraq and accumulate 1.74 billion in illicit funds according to Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group formed after the invasion to find Iraq’s WMD. The 1.74 billion figure cited by Duelfer is considerably less than the 10.1 billion estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office of the 21 billion estimated in a Senate subcommittee report. The current accusations raised by Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) against the U.N. are hypocritical and cynical beyond belief. They are a disgusting attempt to hide the Bush administration’s failed Iraq policy and the death and suffering it has caused.