They are not Numbers By Cindy Sheehan

I received this email the other day. I have removed the names:

Dear Ms. Sheehan ~ I wasn't sure how else to contact you, so am sending this thru the gsfp website. I just want to thank you for posting your essay entitled, 'A Peaceful Day' dated October 17th on the commondreams.org website (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1017-30.htm), a site I visit every weekday.  

My cousin, "brave soldier", 30, originally of Indiana, was one of the five U.S. soldiers killed on Saturday, October 15th -- Iraq's 'peaceful day.'  He is survived by his wife, his two children, his parents, his sister, our grandma, his aunt, his two uncles and his two cousins.  We are currently awaiting confirmation per dna identification.

I thank you for taking notice. The loss of his life and that of his comrades does not make for a peaceful day ~ may their souls will rest in peace.

Thank you for your efforts.

I received this email today from a distraught Gold Star Mother:

How?

I have so many questions.....How I do I stop the vulgar pain in my chest?  How do I do this?  How I do I continue to breathe but cannot live?  How do I do this?  How do I keep my soul in my body?  How do I do this?  How do I close my eyes wondering if sleep should come but yet knowing if I sleep I will awaken to know this is not a nightmare but my life?  How do I do this?  How do I love someone with my every being but cannot ever hold him again?  How do I do this?  How do I go on without that sweet face that brought more joy to my life than I ever deserve never be seen by my eyes again?  How do I do this?  How do I stop the scream that no one hears but me?  How do I do this?  PLEASE TELL ME...how do I live without my child, my son, my heart, my soul, my joy, my validation to my life...Please tell me ...how do I do this?  How  does the world go on without Steven....how do I do this?

I received this email yesterday from a mom who doesn't "qualify" to be a Gold Star Mother (from the other org., she does belong to GSFP) because her son committed suicide. He suffered horribly from PTSD.

Hi,

He (Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Ma) was asked about his five boys and his answer was that they were grown, with families and they made their own choices.  He then reminded everyone that our children chose to enlist.  Aggressively recruited would be a better phrase.  And then not told the truth, only to discover like my son that he had made a big mistake.  He went on to say that he had attended all the funerals.  Kevin said simple, no you haven't...  Both Kevin and Debbie felt that the wall was up and that no change of attitude would be forthcoming from our Bush "yes" man.   On the positive side his chief of staff spoke to Kevin privately about veteran affairs and that they would like to improve the system.  

  I find that I can't get Jeffrey out of my mind.  I can see him at 11- 12 years old jumping in the car, when I'd pick him up at a friends.  It's so real...it's almost like you can reach out and touch him.  What a world of hell this administration has put us in.  One we will live in all the rest of our days...  

The 2000th tragically appalling death of American troops is, unfortunately, coming up rapidly in Iraq.

The official death count today from the War Department's Casualty site is 1992. The toll could reach 2000 within a couple of days.

Of the 1992, 13 are pending notification. I have written about "pending notification" before. 13 families are going through their normal lives today not even knowing that the other shoe is about to drop. They have been worrying about their loved one for days, weeks, or even months. Some of them may know that 11 of our children have been killed in the last 2 days and they may be anxiously awaiting news. Will it be their lives destroyed today? Or is it another family who was randomly picked by the universe to suffer this violent assault on their homes?

There are so many people in our country today that are happily certain that their lives are not about to be turned upside down because their darling child will be killed in a meaningless war. This would include every member of this criminal administration and Congress and every person who puts headphones on and spews right-wing hate from their mouths. Not one of these people who mostly support the war, either out-spokenly, or tacitly by their silence in not calling for an end to the occupation of Iraq, have any idea of the horror of laying awake at night worried about your wonderful child, or walking around all day with an icy-cold stomach because you heard that soldiers were killed in Iraq today.

We know that George Bush and his supporters who are crumbling like 3 day old sugar cookies care not one whit about the people they have sent to die and kill innocent people in Iraq. We know that George, Dick, Condi (who I believe is the Deputy Secretary of War...she never thinks of the Diplomatic solution), Donny (In charge of the killing department), and the rest will never admit that they made a mistake, because guess what folks? Things are going just as they have planned in Iraq! They are happy as clams in their shells that things are in chaos and turmoil in the Middle East. That means that they and their partners in crime can rake in more money, rape Iraq of its resources and empty our treasury of money and our communities of future leaders.

The little vignettes of pain that I have shared with you are just 3 stories out of millions. Out of the tens of thousands of mothers in Iraq who have had their children killed, how many of them remember their baby boy or pre-teen child with their innocent eyes reflected with the mom's hopes and dreams of their future?

Casey had such a bright future ahead of him. Someone asked me the other day what I miss about him the most. I just miss him. I miss everything about him. I miss his presence on this planet. I miss his naïve joy and heartbreaking hope for the future. I miss his future and I remember his past with love and pain.

On the sorrowful day of the 2000th soldier killed, I am sure there will be candlelight vigils all over the country to honor the ones who have been killed. That is nice, but that doesn't help bring our other troops home or insure the safety of the Iraqi people.

On the day of the 2000th, I will be in DC. I will go to the White House. Our house. I will sit on the sidewalk again and demand that the war criminals who live and work in there bring our troops home. I suggest instead of candlelight vigils and singing "Give Peace a Chance" every person who cares about ending the immorality of the occupation of Iraq take signs and their presence to their Congressional offices near them and demand that each and every Congress person do everything in his/her power to bring our precious lifeblood home from the nightmare.

It is time to get peacefully radical.

The day of the wrought with voting fraud constitutional referendum in Iraq, George said:

"Democracies are peaceful countries."

Let's hold him and our other elected officials accountable for that hypocritical statement. If George won't make it so, we must!

Our young people aren't numbers. Our young people are confined to early graves because of criminals who should be confined to prison that are profiting handsomely from the undeclared mess in Iraq. The Iraqi people are less than numbers. If they are counted or thought of at all, they are very often wrongly counted as "insurgents" when they are children and women.

If mere numbers will wake America up, think of Dr. and Mrs. Death (Donny and Condi) when they say that this occupation could last at least a dozen or more years.

What number are you comfortable with? One was too much for me.

 

My #1 issue - Flaws in Electronic Voting

GAO Report Finds Flaws in Electronic Voting 
    

Rep. Waxman led twelve members of Congress today in releasing a new GAO report that found security and reliability flaws in the electronic voting process.

    In a joint press release, Rep. Waxman said, "The GAO report indicates that we need to get serious and act quickly to improve the security of electronic voting machines. The report makes clear that there is a lack of transparency and accountability in electronic voting systems - from the day that contracts are signed with manufacturers to the counting of electronic votes on Election Day. State and local officials are spending a great deal of money on machines without concrete proof that they are secure and reliable."

    The GAO report found flaws in security, access, and hardware controls, as well as weak security management practices by voting machine vendors. The report identified multiple examples of actual operational failures in real elections and found that while national initiatives to improve the security and reliability of electronic voting systems are underway, "it is unclear when these initiatives will be available to assist state and local election authorities."

    Rep. Waxman also released a fact sheet summarizing the report's key findings.

    Fact Sheet

    Overall Findings

    In October 2005, the Government Accountability Office released a comprehensive analysis of the concerns raised by the increasing use of electronic voting machines.

    Overall, GAO found that "significant concerns about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems" have been raised (p. 22).

    GAO indicated that "some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes" (p. 23).

    According to GAO, "election officials, computer security experts, citizen advocacy groups, and others have raised significant concerns about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems, citing instances of weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate system version control, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management, and vague or incomplete standards, among other issues. ... The security and reliability concerns raised in recent reports merit the focused attention of federal, state, and local authorities responsible for election administration" (p. 22-23).

    Specific Problems Identified by GAO

    Based on reports from election experts, GAO compiled numerous examples of problems with electronic voting systems. These included:

    Flaws in System Security Controls

    Examples of problems reported by GAO include (1) computer systems that fail to encrypt data files containing cast votes, allowing them to be viewed or modified without detection by internal auditing systems; (2) systems that could allow individuals to alter ballot definition files so that votes cast for one candidate are counted for another; and (3) weak controls that allowed the alteration of memory cards used in optical scan machines, potentially impacting election results. GAO concluded that "these weaknesses could damage the integrity of ballots, votes, and voting system software by allowing unauthorized modifications (p. 25).

    Flaws in Access Controls

    Examples of problems reported by GAO include (1) the failure to password-protect files and functions; (2) the use of easily guessed passwords or identical passwords for numerous systems built by the same manufacturer; and (3) the failure to secure memory cards used to secure voting systems, potentially allowing individuals to vote multiple times, change vote totals, or produce false election reports.

    According to GAO, "in the event of lax supervision, the ... flaws could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are crucial to the accuracy and integrity of the voting process" (p. 26).

    Flaws in Physical Hardware Controls

    In addition to identifying flaws in software and access controls, GAO identified basic problems with the physical hardware of electronic voting machines. Example of problems reported by GAO included locks that could be easily picked or were all controlled by the same keys, and unprotected switches used to turn machines on and off that could easily be used to disrupt the voting process (p. 27).

    Weak Security Management Practices by Voting Machine Vendors

    Experts contacted by GAO reported a number of concerns about the practices of voting machine vendors, including the failure to conduct background checks on programmers and system developers, the lack of internal security protocols during software development, and the failure to establish clear chain of custody procedures for handling and transporting software (p. 29).

    Actual Examples of Voting System Failure

    GAO found multiple examples of actual operational failures in real elections. These examples include the following incidents:

• In California, a county presented voters with an incorrect electronic ballot, meaning they could not vote in certain races (p. 29).
  
  
• In Pennsylvania, a county made a ballot error on an electronic voting system that resulted in the county's undervote percentage reaching 80% in some precincts (p. 29-30).
  
  
• In North Carolina, electronic voting machines continued to accept votes after their memories were full, causing over 4,000 votes to be lost (p. 31).
  
  
• In Florida, a county reported that touch screens took up to an hour to activate and had to be activated sequentially, resulting in long delays (p. 31).

    Current Federal Standards and Initiatives Are Ineffective and Are Unlikely to Provide Solutions in a Timely Fashion

    GAO reported that voluntary standards for electronic voting, adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission, have been criticized for containing vague and incomplete security provisions, inadequate provisions for commercial products and networks, and inadequate documentation requirements (pp. 32-33).

    GAO further reported that "security experts and some election officials have expressed concern that tests currently performed by independent testing authorities and state and local election officials do not adequately assess electronic voting system security and reliability," and that "these concerns are amplified by what some perceive as a lack of transparency in the testing process" (p. 34). The GAO report indicated that national initiatives to improve voting system security and reliability of electronic voting systems (such as updated standards from the Election Assistance Commission; federal accreditation of independent testing laboratories; and certification of voting systems to national standards) are underway, but " a majority of these efforts either lack specific plans for implementation in time to affect the 2006 general election or are not expected to be completed until after the 2006 election" (p. 43). As a result, GAO found that "it is unclear when these initiatives will be available to assist state and local election officials" (p. 43). According to GAO, "Until these efforts are completed, there is a risk that many state and local jurisdictions will rely on voting systems that were not developed, acquired, tested, operated, or managed in accordance with rigorous security and reliability standards - potentially affecting the reliability of future elections and voter confidence in the accuracy of the vote count" (p. 53).

    Recommendations

    GAO made several recommendations, primarily aimed at the federal Election Assistance Commission (p. 53). GAO recommended that the EAC should:

• Collaborate with appropriate technical experts to define specific tasks, outcomes, milestones, and resource needs required to improve voting system standards;
  
  
• Expeditiously establish documented policies, criteria, and procedures for certifying voting systems; and
  
  
• Improve support for state and local officials via improved information dissemination information on voting machine software, the problems and vulnerabilities of voting machines, and the "best practices" used by state and local officials to ensure the security of electronic voting machines.

    To view the full report: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/Documents/20051021122225-53143.pdf.

Texas Court Issues Warrant for Delay

Texas Court Issues Warrant for DeLay
    By Suzanne Gamboa
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 19 October 2005

    A Texas court on Wednesday issued a warrant for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's arrest, and set an initial $10,000 bail as a routine step before his first court appearance on conspiracy and state money laundering charges.

    Travis County court officials said DeLay was ordered to appear at the Fort Bend County, Texas, jail for booking, where he'd likely be fingerprinted and photographed. DeLay's lawyers had hoped to avoid such a spectacle.

    The warrant, known as a capias, is "a matter of routine and bond will be posted," DeLay attorney Dick DeGuerin said.

    The lawyer declined to say when DeLay would surrender to authorities but said the lawmaker would make his first court appearance Friday morning.

    The charges against the Texas Republican stem from allegations that a DeLay-founded Texas political committee funneled corporate money into state GOP legislative races through the National Republican Party.

Peaceful Day in Iraq by Cindy Sheehan

Peaceful Day in Iraq

by CindySheehan

I keep hearing on the news that this past Saturday was a relatively "peaceful" day in Iraq. Despite many reports already of alleged election fraud (shades of Ohio and Florida), George and his cronies are cautiously optimistic that the referendum for the constitution will pass. George Bush says that it looks like Iraq is heading for "peace."

I have two points to make about the referendum vote in Iraq on Saturday. First of all, George told us in his headlong rush to disaster in Iraq that Saddam had WMD's and that Iraq was culpable for 9/11. George and his band of war monsters still despicably say 9/11 in every major speech in defense of the invasion and continued occupation. He never said "regime change" or spreading "freedom and democracy." If the constitution passes, what will be the next devious justification for the occupation?

Secondly, I hate to spoil CNN's euphoria over the vote on the referendum, but 5 soldiers and a Marine were killed by IED's on Saturday. I wonder if the families of those tragically slain on the "peaceful" day are celebrating the turn-out on Saturday? I know I don't think that it was worth Casey dying so the people of Iraq can vote in a theocracy.

The soldiers and the Marine were all killed by IED's. There exists such a thing as an IED jammer. For $47,000/vehicle, our children can be saved from most of the IED attacks. The Pentagon has decided that $47,000 is too much to spend to keep our children alive!!! Halliburton steals that much from the Pentagon before the CEO's first cup of morning coffee. For the two vehicles that were destroyed and the 6 of our children killed, it comes to a little over $15,000 per person. Not to be crass, but the government will be handing each family a check for $100, 000.00 soon (the deaths are still "pending") and $400,000.00 in insurance death benefits. I know each family would mortgage their homes, or sell their souls, if they knew it would have cost $15,000.00 to keep their precious family member alive.

We can't let these criminals in power to come up with another sham reason to keep our troops in Iraq. Iraq does not now and never has needed our military presence there.

Our young men and women have done everything they have been asked to do so far. It is time to reward them by not asking anymore of them and bringing them home alive.

We know that the "counted" dead Iraqis have been 3663 in the previous 6 months. How many more have not been counted? How many of them even have names to us?

It is time to for us to stop the serial abusers in power. Each day we delay means more flag draped coffins and more shattered lives.

Supporting Hillary by Cindy Sheehan

Supporting HIllary

by CindySheehan

I would love to support Hillary for President if she would come out against the travesty in Iraq. But I don't think she can speak out against the occupation, because she supports it.

I will not make the mistake of supporting another pro-war Democrat for president again: As I won't support a pro-war Republican.

This country wants this occupation to end. The world wants the occupation to end. People in Iraq want this occupation to end.

Senator Clinton: taking the peace road would not prove you are weak. Instead, it would prove that you are the strongest and wisest candidate. As a mom, as an American, as a patriot: I implore you to have the strength and courage to lead the fight for peace.

I want to support you, I want to work for you, but like many American moms, I will resist your candidacy with every bit of my power and strength unless you show us the wisdom it takes to be a truly great leader.

Prove that you are "passionate" and reflect our nations' values and refusal to support imperialism, greed and torture.  

Senator Clinton: come out against this occupation of Iraq. Not because it is the politically expedient thing to do but because it is the humane thing to do. If you want to make Casey's sacrifice count, bring the rest of his buddies home alive.

*

I did meet with Sen. Clinton, along with Sen. Harry Reid, on September 22, 2005.  No one has asked me how it went with Sen. Reid, but I've been asked about my meeting with Sen. Clinton many times. A few days earlier in Brooklyn, I had referred to her as waiting for a politically "expedient" moment to speak out against the war in Iraq. I, of course, think that this tactic is wrong, because politics has nothing to do with the slaughter going on in Iraq. No one asked the almost 2000 Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have been killed what political party they were rooting for. When a mother receives the news that her son or daughter has been killed for lies she never thinks "Oh no, how could this have happened? I am a Democrat(Republican)!!!"

Playing politics with our soldiers' lives is despicable.

I thought the meeting with Sen. Clinton went well. I thought she listened and heard what we had to say. I went with another Gold Star Mother, Lynn Braddach, and my sister, Dede Miller. After Sen. Reid left, Mrs. Clinton stayed for a few more moments and she told us that she had met with the other Gold Star Mothers who had a different view from ours. I said it didn't really matter, because our view is right. Lynn, Dede, and I don't want our loved ones to be used as political pawns to justify the killing spree in Iraq. I can't believe any mother who has had her heart and soul torn out would wish that on another mother. How often do the lies have to be exposed before every American (elected official, media representative, average citizen) wakes up and says, "enough killing is enough!"

I thought Mrs. Clinton listened, but apparently she didn't because immediately afterwards she said the following to Sarah Ferguson of the Village Voice:

"My bottom line is that I don't want their sons to die in vain... I don't believe it's smart to set a date for withdrawal... I don't think it's the right time to withdraw."

That quote sounds exactly like what the few Republicans I talked to that week said. Making sure that our children did not die in "vain" sounds exactly like something George Bush says. A "date" for withdrawal? That sounds like Rush Limbaugh to me. That doesn't sound like an opposition party leader speaking to me. What Sen. Clinton said after our meeting sounds exactly like the Republican Party talking points  I heard from Senators Dole and McCain.

Sen. Clinton is in California today to raise money for her political campaigns. An invitation to one star-studded gala reads:

"We must stand with Senator Clinton as she stands up for what we believe in. Hillary is and always has been our champion in the White House and the Senate." And she's one of the "strongest, most passionate and intelligent Democrats."

I didn't get an invitation to any of the events, but maybe it's because she doesn't stand up for what I believe in. I don't believe in continuing this occupation of Iraq and I don't believe in killing more of our soldiers because my son has already been needlessly and tragically killed. I don't believe she is passionate. I think she is a political animal who believes she has to be a war hawk to keep up with the big boys. She is intelligent, there's no doubt about that. However, I believe that the intelligent thing for Democrats to do for 2006 and 2008 would be to come out strongly and correctly against the botched, bungled, illegal, and immoral occupation of Iraq.

62% of Americans now believe that this war is based on lies and betrayals and want our troops to start coming home. 53% of Americans want our troops to come home immediately. The last time I looked, Democrats did not comprise 62% of our population. Americans oppose this war in overwhelming numbers and it crosses party lines. Because America can see that the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism and has made the world and our country less secure. America can see that the murder of innocents is not a "right and left" issue, it is a "right and wrong" issue.

Sixty-nine of our best and brightest have been sent meaninglessly and unnecessarily to their premature deaths since I met with Mrs. Clinton on September 22 nd. Sixty-nine mothers and fathers and who knows how many spouses, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, and friends have been meaninglessly and unnecessarily sent into tailspins of grief and emptiness since that meeting.

We all know that Sen. Clinton, along with many other Representatives and Senators voted to give George Bush the authority to invade a sovereign nation that was no threat to the USA. We know that they spinelessly abrogated their constitutional responsibility and duty to declare war. We (and most of them) know that voting to give an irresponsible person authority to wage war was a devastating mistake. But I know that knowing all of that will not bring my son or almost 2000 other Americans back and it won't bring back that nation's war dead, either.

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby - What Juddith has to say.

It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 16 October 2005

    There hasn't been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

    As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

    That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

    Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

    Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

    Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

    The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

    The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, "because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

    Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the president's 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

    It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

    It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

    "Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

    THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history."

    Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room
    By Judith Miller
    The New York Times

    Sunday 16 October 2005

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to read the final three paragraphs aloud to the grand jury. "The public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me," Mr. Libby wrote.

The prosecutor asked my reaction to those words. I replied that this portion of the letter had surprised me because it might be perceived as an effort by Mr. Libby to suggest that I, too, would say we had not discussed Ms. Plame's identity. Yet my notes suggested that we had discussed her job.

    In July 2003, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, created a firestorm by publishing an essay in The New York Times that accused the Bush administration of using faulty intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. The administration, he charged, ignored findings of a secret mission he had undertaken for the Central Intelligence Agency - findings, he said, that undermined claims that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear bomb.

    It was the first time Mr. Wilson had gone public with his criticisms of the White House. Yet he had already become a focus of significant scrutiny at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

    Almost two weeks earlier, in an interview with me on June 23, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, discussed Mr. Wilson's activities and placed blame for intelligence failures on the CIA. In later conversations with me, on July 8 and July 12, Mr. Libby, who is Mr. Cheney's top aide, played down the importance of Mr. Wilson's mission and questioned his performance.

    My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the CIA.

    My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003. (Mr. Novak used her maiden name, Valerie Plame.)

    This is what I told a federal grand jury and the special counsel investigating whether administration officials committed a crime by leaking Ms. Plame's identity and the nature of her job to reporters.

    During my testimony on Sept. 30 and Oct. 12, the special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, asked me whether Mr. Libby had shared classified information with me during our several encounters before Mr. Novak's article. He also asked whether I thought Mr. Libby had tried to shape my testimony through a letter he sent to me in jail last month. And Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether Mr. Cheney had known what his chief aide was doing and saying.

    My interview notes show that Mr. Libby sought from the beginning, before Mr. Wilson's name became public, to insulate his boss from Mr. Wilson's charges. According to my notes, he told me at our June meeting that Mr. Cheney did not know of Mr. Wilson, much less know that Mr. Wilson had traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to verify reports that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium for a weapons program.

    As I told the grand jury, I recalled Mr. Libby's frustration and anger about what he called "selective leaking" by the CIA and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. The selective leaks trying to shift blame to the White House, he told me, were part of a "perverted war" over the war in Iraq. I testified about these conversations after spending 85 days in jail for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury inquiry. Having been summoned to testify before the grand jury, I went to jail instead, to protect my source - Mr. Libby - because he had not communicated to me his personal and voluntary permission to speak.

    At the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby had signed a blanket form waiver, which his lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary, even though Mr. Libby's lawyer also said it had enabled other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury. But I believed that nothing short of a personal letter and a telephone call would allow me to assess whether Mr. Libby truly wished to free me from the pledge of confidentiality I had given him. The letter and the telephone call came last month.

    Equally central to my decision was Mr. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor. He had declined to confine his questioning to the subject of Mr. Libby. This meant I would have been unable to protect other confidential sources who had provided information - unrelated to Mr. Wilson or his wife - for articles published in The Times. Last month, Mr. Fitzgerald agreed to limit his questioning.

    Without both agreements, I would not have testified and would still be in jail.

    I testified in Washington twice - most recently last Wednesday after finding a notebook in my office at The Times that contained my first interview with Mr. Libby. Mr. Fitzgerald told the grand jury that I was testifying as a witness and not as a subject or target of his inquiry.

    This account is based on what I remember of my meetings with Mr. Fitzgerald and my testimony before the grand jury. I testified for almost four hours, much of that time taken by Mr. Fitzgerald asking me to decipher and explain my notes of my interviews with Mr. Libby, which I had provided to him.

    I was not permitted to take notes of what I told the grand jury, and my interview notes on Mr. Libby are sketchy in places. It is also difficult, more than two years later, to parse the meaning and context of phrases, of underlining and of parentheses. On one page of my interview notes, for example, I wrote the name "Valerie Flame." Yet, as I told Mr. Fitzgerald, I simply could not recall where that came from, when I wrote it or why the name was misspelled.

    I testified that I did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby, in part because the notation does not appear in the same part of my notebook as the interview notes from him.

    The First Libby Meeting

    Early in my grand jury testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me to describe my history with Mr. Libby and explain how I came to interview him in 2003.

    I said I had known Mr. Libby indirectly through my work as a co-author of "Germs," a book on biological weapons published in September 2001. Mr. Libby had assisted one of my co-authors, and the first time I met Mr. Libby he asked for an inscribed copy of "Germs."

    In June 2003 I had just returned from Iraq, where I had been embedded with a special military unit charged with finding Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons. Now I was assigned to a team of reporters at The Times examining why no such weapons had been found.

    On the afternoon of June 23, 2003, I arrived at the Old Executive Office Building to interview Mr. Libby, who was known to be an avid consumer of prewar intelligence assessments, which were already coming under fierce criticism. The first entry in my reporter's notebook from this interview neatly captured the question foremost in my mind.

    "Was the intell slanted?" I wrote, referring to the intelligence assessments of Iraq and underlining the word "slanted."

    I recall that Mr. Libby was displeased with what he described as "selective leaking" by the CIA. He told me that the agency was engaged in a "hedging strategy" to protect itself in case no weapons were found in Iraq. "If we find it, fine, if not, we hedged," is how he described the strategy, my notes show.

    I recall that Mr. Libby was angry about reports suggesting that senior administration officials, including Mr. Cheney, had embraced skimpy intelligence about Iraq's alleged efforts to buy uranium in Africa while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Such reports, he said, according to my notes, were "highly distorted."

    Mr. Libby said the vice president's office had indeed pressed the Pentagon and the State Department for more information about reports that Iraq had renewed efforts to buy uranium. And Mr. Cheney, he said, had asked about the potential ramifications of such a purchase. But he added that the CIA "took it upon itself to try and figure out more" by sending a "clandestine guy" to Niger to investigate. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I thought "clandestine guy" was a reference to Mr. Wilson - Mr. Libby's first reference to him in my notes.

    In May and in early June, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist at The Times, wrote of Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger without naming him. Mr. Kristof wrote that Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger "at the behest" of Mr. Cheney's office.

    My notes indicate that Mr. Libby took issue with the suggestion that his boss had had anything to do with Mr. Wilson's trip. "Veep didn't know of Joe Wilson," I wrote, referring to the vice president. "Veep never knew what he did or what was said. Agency did not report to us."

    Soon afterward Mr. Libby raised the subject of Mr. Wilson's wife for the first time. I wrote in my notes, inside parentheses, "Wife works in bureau?" I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I believed this was the first time I had been told that Mr. Wilson's wife might work for the CIA. The prosecutor asked me whether the word "bureau" might not mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I told him, normally. But Mr. Libby had been discussing the CIA, and therefore my impression was that he had been speaking about a particular bureau within the agency that dealt with the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. As to the question mark, I said I wasn't sure what it meant. Maybe it meant I found the statement interesting. Maybe Mr. Libby was not certain whether Mr. Wilson's wife actually worked there.

    What was evident, I told the grand jury, was Mr. Libby's anger that Mr. Bush might have made inaccurate statements because the CIA failed to share doubts about the Iraq intelligence.

    "No briefer came in and said, 'You got it wrong, Mr. President,' " he said, according to my notes.

    The Second Libby Meeting

    I interviewed Mr. Libby for a second time on July 8, two days after Mr. Wilson published his essay attacking the administration on the Op-Ed Page of The Times.

    Our meeting, which lasted about two hours, took place over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington. I told Mr. Fitzgerald that I almost certainly began this interview by asking about Mr. Wilson's essay, which appeared to have agitated Mr. Libby. As I recall, Mr. Libby asserted that the essay was inaccurate.

    Mr. Fitzgerald asked about a notation I made on the first page of my notes about this July 8 meeting, "Former Hill staffer."

    My recollection, I told him, was that Mr. Libby wanted to modify our prior understanding that I would attribute information from him to a "senior administration official." When the subject turned to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Libby requested that he be identified only as a "former Hill staffer." I agreed to the new ground rules because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.

    Did Mr. Libby explain this request? Mr. Fitzgerald asked. No, I don't recall, I replied. But I said I assumedMr. Libby did not want the White House to be seen as attacking Mr. Wilson.

    Mr. Libby then proceeded through a lengthy and sharp critique of Mr. Wilson and what Mr. Libby viewed as the CIA's backpedaling on the intelligence leading to war. According to my notes, he began with a chronology of what he described as credible evidence of Iraq's efforts to procure uranium. As I told Mr. Fitzgerald and the grand jury, Mr. Libby alluded to the existence of two intelligence reports about Iraq's uranium procurement efforts. One report dated from February 2002. The other indicated that Iraq was seeking a broad trade relationship with Niger in 1999, a relationship that he said Niger officials had interpreted as an effort by Iraq to obtain uranium.

    My notes indicate that Mr. Libby told me the report on the 1999 delegation had been attributed to Joe Wilson.

    Mr. Libby also told me that on the basis of these two reports and other intelligence, his office had asked the CIA for more analysis and investigation of Iraq's dealings with Niger. According to my interview notes, Mr. Libby told me that the resulting cable - based on Mr. Wilson's fact-finding mission, as it turned out - barely made it out of the bowels of the CIA. He asserted that George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, had never even heard of Mr. Wilson.

    As I told Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby also cited a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, produced by American intelligence agencies in October 2002, which he said had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium.

Read More:  t r u t h o u t - Judith Miller Releases Carefully Worded Statement

395 U.S. - 3,663 Iraqis DEAD in 6 months for GREED

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051014/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_deaths&printer=1

3,663 Iraqis Killed in Past 6 Months

 The Saturday's vote on Iraq's new constitution takes place nearly six months after the country's first elected government took power, and during that period at least 3,663 Iraqis have been killed in war-related violence, according to an Associated Press count.

The current interim government took power on April 28 after long negotiations that followed parliamentary elections in January.

The AP gathered the statistics on Iraqi dead on a daily basis from hospital officials, Iraqi police, the Iraqi military and other government officials.

The Iraqi deaths include civilians, bodyguards, police, security forces and the military. They do not include the nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims killed in an Aug. 21 stampede on a Baghdad bridge that began when rumors spread through the crowd that a suicide bomber was among the faithful.

As of Thursday, the AP count also showed that at least 395 members of the U.S. military have died in the same period.

Since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, at least 1,970 members of the U.S. military have died, according to a separate AP count. At least 1,531 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers. The figures include five military civilians.

There is no way to compare the Iraqi death toll from April 28 to present with earlier periods because it was impossible to obtain figures from many areas of the country. Also there is still no single central source for war-related Iraqi deaths

IRAQ

A US soldier on the streets of Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. US officials might see the trial of Hussein, which opens on Wednesday, as helping to justify an increasingly unpopular Iraq war, but it could end up as a double-edged sword for them(AFP/File/Jewel Samad)  

 

Iraqi wounded children rest in the emergency room of a hospital in Baghdad. The children and their father were wounded in a roadside bomb that targeted a US convoy as Iraqis started to prepare for an historic referendum on their draft constitution.(AFP/Karim Sahib)  

US soldiers from Bravo Company, TF 4-64, 3rd Infantry Division talk with an Iraqi boy beside their Bradley fighting vehicle as their unit escorts Iraqi army soldiers to polling stations to perform shift changes for soldiers currently guarding the sites, in central Baghdad.(AFP/David Furst)  

 Under the cover of darkness, US soldiers from the 1-64 3rd infantry division lay concrete barriers at Iraqi polling sites in advance of the upcoming referendum in an effort to help ward off attacks at the sites, in south-eastern Baghdad, 12 October. Iraqis will vote on a new constitution on Saturday(AFP/File/David Furst)  

U.S. army soldiers walk behind a razor wire fence as Iraqi soldiers (rear) stand guard at a polling station in Baquba, Iraq, October 14, 2005. A security clampdown emptied city streets and highways across Iraq on Friday on the eve of a constitutional referendum that militants have vowed to disrupt. REUTERS/Jorge Silva  

An Iraqi Sunni boy attends prayers in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 14 2005. Sunni insurgents launched five attacks against the largest Sunni Arab political party on the eve of Iraq's crucial referendum Friday, bombing and burning offices and the home of one of its leaders in retaliation after the group dropped its opposition to the draft constitution. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)  

US soldiers disembark from an army helicopter on their way to the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, August 23, 2005. Afghan rebels are now travelling to Iraq to learn from insurgents there and returning home equipped with deadlier weapons and new techniques to use against US

 

 Iraqi children reach to an US soldier taking part in a joint patrol with the Iraqi army in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 14 2005. U.S. and Iraqi forces stepped up security across Iraq and prepared to impose an overnight curfew in an effort to reduce insurgent attacks aimed at wrecking this weekend's constitutional referendum. (AP Photo/Mohammed Uraibi)  

U.S. army soldiers walk outside a polling station during a patrol near Baquba, Iraq October 14, 2005. A security clampdown emptied city streets and highways across Iraq on Friday on the eve of a constitutional referendum that militants have vowed to disrupt. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

 

A child looks on as Iraqi Interior Ministry special forces patrol the streets of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 14 2005. U.S. and Iraqi forces stepped up security across Iraq and prepared to impose an overnight curfew in an effort to reduce insurgent attacks aimed at wrecking this weekend's constitutional referendum. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

 

In this undated photo released by the Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, Spc. Oliver J. Brown is shown. Brown, 19, of Athens, Pa., was killed in Iraq on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2005, along with four other Pennsylvania National Guard members from the 109th Infantry,(AP Photo/Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs)

1,965 By Cindy Sheehan

 Thursday 13 October 2005

    Going to the movies was something Casey and I enjoyed doing together. Casey was a Theater Arts major in college, and he went with a critical eye. Since I love sharing my children's passions with them, Casey and I would go to the movie theater often.

    We saw two movies the last time he was home at Christmas, 2003, before he was deployed to Iraq ... We saw the last movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the live action movie Peter Pan. I still have the ticket stub for that movie in my wallet. We got to the theater a little late, so we had to sit up front with the moms and dads and their small children. I commented to Casey that it looked like we were the only "grown ups" interested in the movie. The small children were cute to watch as they enjoyed the movie, and Casey and I got quite a few chuckles from them also.

    On Ash Wednesday of 2004, a few days before Casey left for Iraq, his dad and I went to see The Passion of the Christ. That was our Ash Wednesday penance that year. Casey's dad fell asleep during the scourging scene while I sat in my seat and quietly sobbed. I was especially touched by the actress who played Jesus' mom, who followed her son along while he was being violently tortured and killed by devious men with an evil agenda. Of course, since I became a mom over 26 years ago, I have identified with Mary as she sobbed at the foot of her son's cross and cradled his lifeless body in her arms.

    I am recounting all of this, because since Casey was killed in Iraq by devious men with evil agendas, I find it extremely difficult to go to the movies. Yesterday, I went to the same movie theater in Vacaville, California, that Casey and I loved to attend. My sister and I saw the movie "Serenity." It was a good science fiction flick that was entertaining and had many parallels with what is going on in our world today. But that is not what affected me about yesterday's movie-going experience.

    First of all, it breaks my heart to be in the theater where Casey and I saw so many films together. While we were waiting for the movie to start, the interminable previews started. About the 4th one in, a preview for the movie Jarheads came on. My sister quickly said; "Close your eyes." Well, I already had them closed, but what I heard was tough enough. I heard a flight attendant tell a plane load of Marines "Good luck, now" as they got off of the plane, I am assuming in Kuwait. I wondered if a smiling flight attendant said the same thing to Casey has he deplaned in Kuwait. I will never know. I can't ask him and he didn't tell me in the one phone call I received from him before he was killed 5 days after he arrived in Baghdad.

    Well, that did it for me. I couldn't stop sobbing for 20 minutes after that preview. I tried to do it quietly as to not disturb the other movie goers. I wonder how many other theater patrons have been so affected by the preview for Jarheads?

    God forbid anyone get too disturbed over the devastation and needless death and suffering in Iraq. God forbid that the media tell us that 32 of our young people have been slaughtered in Iraq so far in October. God forbid that we have to think about the hundreds of faceless and nameless Iraqis who have been needlessly killed, too, just performing day-to-day tasks.

    God forbid that anyone be held accountable for the mayhem in the Middle East! God forbid that a broken-hearted and honest mother speak from her heart about the lies and betrayals of George and gang that makes some war supporters uncomfortable.

    The War Department lists 1963 confirmed dead and 2 pending confirmation, for a total of 1965. Thirty-five more of our children to go before the grisly number of 2000 is reached. 2000 will be the wake-up call for some Americans ... but whatever number Casey was, was a wake-up call for me: a violent and tragic wake up call. Casey was not a number, and the 2000th will not be a number to his or her family. Casey was a wonderful young man who loved to go to the movies with his mom. What will number 2000 be like? What will be his/her passion that will be snuffed out with the heartbeat? Which mom in America will be the unfortunate one to fall on the floor screaming for her baby next, for nothing?

    No, most Americans probably did not sob when they saw the previews for Jarhead, and most Americans probably didn't go straight to their son's premature grave to place fresh flowers after their movie outing.

    I did. God forbid that I am angry and God forbid that I want someone to be held accountable for George's war of choice that has robbed so much from almost 2000 families.

Sheehan Family - Casey,Pat,Carly,Janey,Cindy and Andy

Bring Them Home NOW

Cindy Sheehan Is Working To Bring Our Troops Home: "Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?"

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Casey Sheehan re-enlisted with the Army in August of 2003, knowing that his unit would eventually be deployed in Iraq. Casey, a Humvee mechanic with the 1st Calvary, was killed in Sadr City on April 4th of this year. He was only 24 years old. He is and forever will remain an American hero.

Casey’s mom, Cindy Sheehan, is a hero too. Angered that her son was sent to fight and die in an unjust war for reasons that have proven to be lies, Cindy is speaking out about the Iraq invasion. Cindy has joined other moms and families who have lost loved ones in the conflict to tell Americans about the true costs of the war. Their group, Real Voices (http://realvoices.org/rv/index.html), is running television ads featuring the voices of Americans like Cindy speaking directly to President Bush about the impact of his failed policies and lies.

We are honored to bring you our interview with Cindy Sheehan about her son Casey and why she decided to speak out about the Iraq war.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Your son Casey died April 4 in Iraq. Whom do you hold responsible for your loss?

Cindy Sheehan: George W. Bush.

BuzzFlash: Why?

Cindy Sheehan: I think he rushed into this war -–this invasion –- without having proper intelligence. And the reasons he went are so clearly wrong -–from his false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to there being no connection between Iraq and Saddam and Osama bin Laden. He diverted attention and troops and resources from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda to Iraq.

I don’t think Iraq has anything to do with the war on terror, except now terrorists are crossing the borders to go and kill innocent Iraqis and our troops. So he went almost unilaterally, with very little international support, to invade a country. They didn’t have a plan for the peace or for the occupation of Iraq.

My son was killed by Shiite insurgents. I believe George Bush created the insurgency by his failed policies and that’s why my son was killed.

BuzzFlash: Tell usalittle bit about Casey. What kind of a young man was he? I know he was only 24 years old when he died.

Cindy Sheehan: He was an amazing person. He has been an altar server for 10 years. He finally quit when he graduated from high school and asked me, "You know, Mom, can I quit altar serving? Can I be an usher or something now at Mass?"I was the coordinator of our youth Mass at our parish. And he was an Eagle Scout. He was a Eucharistic Minister, and he had trained to be a Eucharistic Minister in the field when they went to Iraq, to help the priest. But he was only there for two weeks before he was killed on Palm Sunday. He never missed Mass.

He had joined the Army because they promised him he could finish his college degree. He had already been going to college for three years before he joined the Army. My husband and I just went to Ft. Hood a couple weeks ago because the Catholic chapel he always went to was starting a new Knights of Columbus Council, and they decided to name it after Casey. It’s the Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan Knights of Columbus Council because they say that his love for his God, his church, his country and his family embodied what they want to stand for.

He was amazing. He was just the most calm and peaceful and gentle person that anybody would ever know. He was so quiet, but he had such an impact on everybody’s lives. And he was so brave. He saved American lives, but our question is, what are any of them doing there?

BuzzFlash: Casey, as I understand it, technically did not have to go to Iraq since he was a field mechanic. Is that correct?

Cindy Sheehan: He was a Humvee mechanic. He re-enlisted in August of 2003 because he didn’t want his buddies to do the job by themselves. It’s all about what they’re doing now -- our soldiers are trying to keep themselves alive and trying to keep each other alive at this point right now.

BuzzFlash: When did Casey receive news that his unit was being sent to Iraq?

Cindy Sheehan: I think it was probably around last October, 2003, because they went to the National Training Center (NTC) at Ft. Irwin in the California desert in November. So we knew before he went to Ft. Irwin that they were going to be deployed sometime in March. Casey knew the First Cavalry was going to end up going to Iraq when he re-enlisted.

BuzzFlash: Did you have any correspondence with Casey while he was in Iraq before he was killed? Did he say or did you hear about what the situation was like on the ground?

Cindy Sheehan: He called me one time from Kuwait. They still hadn’t gone to Iraq. And he never complained. He said that it was hot and he was really busy because he had to get their vehicles ready to go on the convoy from Kuwait to Baghdad. He was on his way to Mass, and we talked about when he stopped in Ireland to refuel. We’re Irish, so he found an airport employee that was telling him about the history of our name, the Sheehan name.

He started writing us a letter on March 31st, because we didn’t know where we could send him mail or presents or supplies or anything yet. They didn’t tell them until they got to Saudi City where we could send them things. But he started writing us letters. And he said the convoy from Kuwait to Baghdad was real peaceful, and it looked like it was going to be an easy year of deployment. He wrote that on March 31st, and he was killed April 4th.

We never got the letter. It was in his things that we got from Baghdad. He didn’t even finish it.

BuzzFlash: President Bush told you, Casey, and every American, that we needed to invade Iraq to remove weapons of mass destruction -- an assertion that, as you said, has proven to be a lie -- and to fight terrorism, which is also untrue. When Casey left to go to Iraq, did the two of you talk about why you both felt that the United States was in Iraq, and what the United States was fighting for?

Cindy Sheehan: We didn’t understand why the United States was there. We never thought that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. But Casey told me, "Mom, this is what we trained for. I’m ready. It’s my job. Because the sooner I get there, the sooner I’ll come home."And he came home three weeks later in a flag-draped coffin.

BuzzFlash: Right now you, along with many other families who have lost loved ones in Iraq, are speaking out in various ways, part of which is a television ad criticizing Bush’s decision to mislead our country into a war. What made you decide to speak out, knowing the toll that it would take on you?

Cindy Sheehan: I have to. I can’t bring my son back. I can’t go back to April 3rd and bring Casey home. I can’t stand on the side while other mothers and families will have to go through what we’re going through. I have to speak out, and I have to help try to bring the troops home.

No matter who winsNovember 2 -–I hope it’s Kerry -–but no matter who wins, we have to hold them accountable. We have to start putting pressure on our elected officials to bring our troops home from the most unjust and mess of a war that our selected president has got us into.

BuzzFlash: Every month, there have been higher and higher American casualties.

Cindy Sheehan: Except for April, that was the highest. That’s the month my son was killed.

BuzzFlash: Right now, the situation is clearly deteriorating into a civil war. As a mom who’s lost a son in this war, how do you respond when you hear the president say that we need to stay the course in Iraq?

Cindy Sheehan: I respond: How can you stay a course that is so obviously not working? You’re going the wrong way. If you’re on a wrong course, you turn around and go the other way. He has betrayed us. He’s still betraying us, by telling us that everything is going well there. It’s shameful.

BuzzFlash: What would you say to President Bush if you could sit down in the same room and speak to him directly?

Cindy Sheehan: I actually got to meet face to face with the president. He called me "Mom"because he didn’t know my name, and he didn’t know my son’s name -- he just knows that he’s meeting with these families that have lost loved ones. He said, "Mom, I can’t imagine the pain you’re going through."

I said, "I think you can imagine it a little bit, Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?"

I told him, "Trust me, Mr. President –- you don’t want to go there."

He said, "You’re right. I don’t."

BuzzFlash: Cindy, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Cindy Sheehan: Thank you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan, left, talks with reporters after delivering a letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Sacramento office demanding that he withdraw the National Guard from Iraq, Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq a year ago, camped outside President Bush's ranch in Texas for 28 days in August to protest U.S. policy in Iraq. At right is Sheehan's sisiter, Dede Miller.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)     

Peace activist Cindy Sheehan, right, gets a hug of support from Leslie Hill, after delivering a letter to California Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger's Sacramento office demanding that he withdraw the National Guard from Iraq on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq a year ago, camped outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, for 28 days in August to protesting U.S. policy in Iraq. Hill, from Sacramento, has a daughter in the Navy and said she supports Sheehans efforts. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)    

US soldiers return to their base after an assault on Iraqi insurgents south of Baghdad. US President George W. Bush said he anticipates violence in Iraq when the country's constitution is put to a referendum on Saturday, but he predicted that voters would turn out regardless.(AFP/US Army/Spc Jennifer D. Atkinson)  

Iraqi food distributors count copies of the draft constitution before they give them to the public in Baghdad's poor neighbourhood of Sadr City. At least 46 people were killed in attacks in Iraq, including a suicide car bombing in a crowded market, just four days before a vote on the new constitution.(AFP/Ahmad al-Rubaye)  

 

An Iraqi doctor attends to a boy that suffered burns when mortar rounds landed on a market in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday Oct. 11 2005. Insurgents determined to wreck Iraq's constitutionalreferendum killed nearly 45 people and wounded dozens in a series of attacks Tuesday, including a suicide car bomb that ripped apart a crowded market in a town near the Syrian border, police said.(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)  

 A US soldier examines remains at the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005.Insurgents determined to wreck Iraq's constitutional referendum killed nearly 45 people and wounded dozens in a series of attacks Tuesday, including a suicide car bomb that ripped apart a crowded market in a town near the Syrian border, police said.(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)  

A U.S. Army soldier provides an over watch during coalition operations in western Iraq near the Syrian boarder by the Euphrates River in this military handout photo taken October 1 and released October 7, 2005. U.S. officials say the western Iraq campaign will continue at least through December, seeking to turn back a rising tide of insurgent violence before an October 15 referendum on a new constitution and a vote in December for a new parliament. Picture taken October 1, 2005. REUTERS/USAF/Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway/Handout

 

A Look at U.S. Military Deaths in Iraq

Associated Press

As of Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2005, at least 1,962 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,528 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's numbers. The figures include five military civilians.

The AP count is eight higher than the Defense Department's tally, last updated at 10 a.m. EDT Wednesday.

The British military has reported 96 deaths; Italy, 26; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Bulgaria, 13; Spain, 11; Slovakia, three; Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Thailand and the Netherlands, two each; and Hungary, Kazakhstan and Latvia one death each.

Since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 1,823 U.S. military members have died, according to AP's count. That includes at least 1,419 deaths resulting from hostile action, according to the military's numbers.

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The latest deaths reported by the military:

- Two U.S. soldiers were killed Wednesday when their vehicle rolled over near Balad, Iraq.

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The latest identifications reported by the military:

- Army Staff Sgt. Matthew A. Kimmell, 30, Paxton, Ind.; died Tuesday in Muqdadiyah, Iraq when an explosive detonated near his vehicle; assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, Fort Campbell, Ky.

- Army Spc. Jeremy M. Hodge, 20, Ridgeway, Ohio; died Monday in Baghdad, Iraq, when an explosive detonated near his vehicle; assigned to the National Guard's 612th Engineer Battalion, Tiffin, Ohio.

- Marine Lance Cpl. Sergio H. Escobar, 18, Pasadena, Calif.; died Sunday in Ramadi, Iraq, from an explosive; assigned to 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, Twentynine Palms, Calif.

Message from Cindy - No More Parking - Death Toll Rises

I Have Arrived. I am Home. by CindySheehan Sun Oct 09, 2005 at 03:37:22 PM PDT

I was honored and humbled to be in the presence of holy man, Thich Nhat Hanh, today at MacArthur Park in a very Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Tha^y, (teacher) as he is known, is a Buddhist monk who was active during the Vietnam War years bringing peace and reconciliation to the countries of North and South Vietnam. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, Jr. He walks with an aura of peace and acceptance radiating from him.

Every day we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive. Thich Nhat Hanh. In a speech I delivered at the Riverside Church in NYC on the one year anniversary of Casey's death, which was also the 37th anniversary of MLK, Jr's death, I said: We must all do one thing for peace each day. I now know that is not enough. We must live peace and embody peace if we want peace on earth. Our entire lives must be for peace. Not just one activity a day.

Every step is peace. That was the theme for today's walk in Mac Arthur Park. Tha^y reminded us to be in the "present" and take every step in peace and know that we are walking on the earth in peace. He lovingly admonished the hundreds of people who came to hear his witness to do everything in peace: eat, walk, talk, breathe, sleep, work, play, etc. No yelling, no angry words, no harsh statements. This admonishment struck me to the bone because I have been so "strident" in my criticism of the Bushies in their quest for power, greed, and destruction. There must be a better way now if we truly want our country to live in eternal peace and not eternal war.

I have arrived. I am home This was the first sign we passed as we started on our walk. Tha^y told us we should say those phrases with every other step. I have arrived. Every second we live is a new arriving in the present. I see so much conflict and struggle in our world because we don't live in this second. We are worried about the next second and mourning the past second. Camp Casey taught me to live each moment in the arrival moment. One of the reasons I have been able to remain so calm in the face of an onslaught of troubles and evil is because I realized in Camp Casey that I could not struggle against the current of my life and change my destiny any more than I could bring my son back from the land of the dead. Each second of each day is our precious arrival and we should honor each moment. Another holy man, Jesus Christ said: Why worry about tomorrow? Today has enough worries of its own.

I am home. I met a new friend today named Jewel whose son was a medic on the front lines in Iraq and has tried to commit suicide three times since he returned from the desert of pain. The distraught Mother who is beside herself with worry said if something isn't done about it and if her boy doesn't get help, he is dying. His superiors will not allow him to be diagnosed for PTSD so he can't get the treatment he so desperately needs. Jewel is Buddhist and I told her: "You realize your son died in Iraq." She replied to me: "We have all died because of this war." She is right. On April 04, 2004, Cindy Sheehan died, but Cindy Sheehan was born. The dead Cindy Sheehan lived for her home and family. She kept a neat and tidy house, often cooked meals, did everyone's laundry, entertained friends, laughed more than she cried, worked at various jobs, and her family meant the entire world to her. She lived an insulated life filled with Thanksgivings and Christmases and Birthdays and other celebrations. The Cindy who was born on 04/04/04 still adores her family above all things but now knows that the human family is worth struggling for too.  The lifelong cause of peace with justice is worth leaving her home (which is just another shell to keep your soul's shell warm and dry) and travel around from home to home and being there and being home wherever she is. I pray for Jewel and especially for her son that he realizes that he died in Iraq but he can be a much better "he" than left his loving home and mother. Unfortunately, and tragically, Jewel and her son's story is not uncommon.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us. Thich Nhat Hanh. While looking up sayings by my new friend, I came upon the above. This has been one of my feelings and themes for months. I know during the terrible war that Tha^y fought against the enemy was "Communism." Now in this evil war that we are struggling against the enemy is "Terrorism." I just saw a poll that only 13 percent of Americans fear a terrorist attack. The war machine and the people who serve it in our government are getting a little afraid themselves of not being able to keep the industrial military complex rolling in the bloody dough, so George and friends have come up with a new enemy whose atrocities also can't be contained to borders and that doesn't wear a national uniform: The Bird Flu. What kind of person who doesn't bow before the warmongers and war profiteers calls the military as his first plan of action when a health threat is supposedly brewing? Instead of calling out the National Guard (who by the way are still fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq), do you think his first call should have been to the CDC? Or to his Surgeon General, and not his military Generals? These people do not walk on this earth anywhere near reality or peace. Our new enemy of the state will be Birds who may be ill and we shall be very afraid every time we sneeze and pray that our government saves us from more imaginary threats. While we are praying, the war profiteers are laughing at us on our knees as they are counting their stacks of wicked and immorally gotten gains.

Last week, George Bush got in front of the nation and said things were going to be far worse in Iraq in the next few months. Why do we let him get away with it? The other night George Bush likened Iraq with WWII. Why do we let him get away with that? Why do we allow our "leaders" to sacrifice our young to the war machine? War will stop when we as parents, teachers, religious leaders, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives refuse to allow our loved ones to be taking to a war of choice and killed. I wish I had refused to allow Casey to go to Iraq. I wish I had knocked him out and taken him to Canada...or anywhere far enough away from the war monster. It is too late for us, but not for you.

Some people think it's a miracle to walk on water. I think it is a miracle to walk on the earth in peace. Thich Nhat Hanh If we don't learn how to do this, we as a people are, well, screwed. We have done a good job of identifying the problem of the criminally insane war in Iraq. Now how do we as a people who want to walk on our earth in peace go forward? I am committing my life and Casey's life to peace. We don't need an exit strategy from Iraq. We just need to get out. We need to realize that Iraq is not the 51st state of the Union and let them live in peace.

How do we do that? Let's walk each step away from the killing, eternal wars andwalk each step in peace towards the answer. Join us in working always for peace, in peace: be peace. "

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"Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan Gets Hero's Welcome

POSTED: 9:04 pm PDT October 5, 2005 UPDATED: 10:55 pm PDT October 5, 2005

OAKLAND -- An energetic Cindy Sheehan came home to Northern California on Wednesday, saying she would continue her campaign against the war in Iraq until all the troops are brought back to the United States.

The local mother who became a lightning rod for the nation's divided feelings about the war while staging a 26-day vigil in front of President Bush's Texas ranch received a hero's welcome from a hometown audience attending a fund-raiser for anti-war groups.

"I'll be a grieving mom until I die because of the lies that took my son," said Sheehan, making her first public appearance in the liberal San Francisco Bay area since the August vigil. "I plan on keeping this up until the troops are brought home."

Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died in April 2004 in Iraq. She has spent much of the time since then speaking out against the war in which her eldest child died, in the process putting an anguished human face on a conflict that seemed remote to many Americans.

Wearing a large peace sign medallion around her neck, Sheehan said Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war were intricately linked because both showed how the government deceived its citizens. She said she was heartbroken by the hurricane, but would continue pressing to make sure the war never leaves the spotlight.

"People are going to die in Iraq no matter what else is going on," she said. "The war needs to be front-page news and the most important story on a daily basis."

Sheehan's speech was a benefit for several anti-war groups, including Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization she co-founded to mobilize families of soldiers who died in Iraq.

Sheehan took up the vigil on Aug. 6 and vowed to keep it up throughout the president's month-long vacation. She said she wanted to meet with Bush to ask why he sent the United States to war and learn what steps he would take to end the conflict.

She never got the requested meeting and missed a week of the protest after her own mother suffered a stroke, but became a rallying point for anti-war activists who joined "Camp Casey," her makeshift campsite in ditches along the road to Bush's ranch.

After wrapping up the vigil on Aug. 31, Sheehan toured the United States, meeting with politicians who included Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-North Carolina. Last week, she was arrested with more than 350 other people after a protest outside the White House.

Sheehan said she has received encouragement and support in Vacaville, Calif. the San Francisco suburb where her three surviving children still live. Sheehan, whose husband filed for divorce while she was staked out in Texas, has since moved to Berkeley.

"People come up to me and say, 'Cindy, thanks for doing what you are doing and welcome home,"' she said.

Sheehan's return to her home state does not signal a break in her activism. She is scheduled to participate on Saturday in a silent peace walk in Los Angeles where she will be joined Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who spent 40 years in exile from his native Vietnam.

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Protesters say parking ban near Bush ranch won't deter them

By Angela K. Brown / Associated Press

CRAWFORD, Texas - Along the narrow road meandering between corn fields and cow pastures, something odd has popped up every few hundred feet: "no parking" signs.

Folks who live in the normally tranquil area near President Bush's ranch never dreamed they would want or need a parking ban until August, when war protesters from around the nation pitched tents in shallow ditches about 2 1/2 miles away from the Western White House.

After residents complained of noise and traffic congestion with the campsite that drew thousands, McLennan County commissioners recently approved new ordinances banning parking on parts of 14 roads near the ranch - roughly a5-mile radius - and prohibiting camping in any county ditch.

"Everyone who lives around here is glad things are back to normal," said Dusty Harrison, who lives about 300 yards from the protesters' site. "With the ban on camping and parking, I believe it will put a stop to it."

But don't count on it, protesters say.

Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., whose 24-year-old son Casey was killed in Iraq last year, started the vigil Aug. 6 to coincide with Bush's monthlong working vacation at his ranch. She and other demonstrators have vowed to return whenever the president does.

"We're going to dog him every step of the way until he brings the troops home from Iraq," Carl Rising-Moore of Indianapolis, a member of Veterans for Peace, said Saturday. "When George W. Bush goes to Crawford, Texas, we will be there."

Sheehan's 26-day protest was lengthier, more publicized and closer to the ranch than previous demonstrations. Other groups obtained a city protest permit and gathered for a few hours in a Crawford park about seven miles from Bush's ranch, which is outside city limits.

Much like in Crawford, local authorities have created free-speech or protest zones far away from Bush when he makes an appearance, said Jim Harrington, one of Sheehan's attorneys.

Harrington represents a dozen protesters suing the city of Austin after police in 2001 blocked them from marching into an area with Bush supporters when he spoke at a museum opening.

Harrington said McLennan County's new parking ordinance also seems unconstitutional because, unlike the countywide camping ban, it applies only to an area around the ranch but was not designed to enhance the president's security. He said he is considering suing the county.

"The idea of getting down close to the ranch is so Bush has to deal with them, and that's what the First Amendment is all about: ... to get in the face of elected leaders," said Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

The county already had an ordinance - initiated by the Secret Service after Bush became president - prohibiting cars from stopping on the road within about a quarter-mile of the ranch. When Bush is there, authorities set up checkpoints about half a mile from the ranch, allowing only residents to drive through.

County Commissioner Ray Meadows, whose precinct includes the Crawford area, said neither the White House nor Secret Service has asked the county to expand the no-parking zone around theranch or to ban camping.

The ordinances aim to prevent another traffic nightmare that inconvenienced residents and threatened the safety of hundreds of protesters milling along the road, Meadows said - not to limit free speech.

"They can get bused out there and march, but they can't stay and camp," Meadows said.

Any parking ban violators face up to a $50 fine for the first offense, $200 fine for the second offense and $500 fine and/or 60 days in the county jail for subsequent offenses. Those who violate the camping ordinance, which also bans portable toilets on public right-of-way areas, could be charged with littering or criminal trespassing.

But the threat of arrest historically hasn't deterred demonstrators.

In fact, Sheehan and hundreds of other protesters were arrested after failing to heed police warnings not to sit on a walkway outside the White House on Sept. 26, after a massive weekend anti-war rally.

Protesters still have an alternative: camping on private property near Bush's ranch.

About two weeks after Sheehan set up camp, a sympathetic landowner allowed the group to use his 1-acre lot about a mile away from the ranch. The group erected a large tent for concerts and speakers but didn't allow cars there, so protesters still parked in ditches. Many anti-war demonstrators continued camping at the first site.

Veterans for Peace and other groups say that if they cannot find private land for future protests, they will return to the ditches.

"If it goes to civil disobedience, so be it," Rising-Moore said. "We don't want to go to jail, but we have people prepared to take this all the way."

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Death Toll Rises for Military Reservists

By Robert Burns / Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The National Guard and Reserves are suffering a strikingly higher share of U.S. casualties in Iraq, their portion of total American military deaths nearly doubling since last year.

Reservists have accounted for one-quarter of all U.S. deaths since the Iraq war began, but the proportion has grown over time. It was 10 percent for the five weeks it took to topple Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and 20 percent for 2004 as a whole.

The trend accelerated this year. For the first nine months of 2005 reservistsaccounted for 36 percent of U.S. deaths, and for August and September it was 56 percent, according to Pentagon figures.

The Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve accounted for more than half of all U.S. deaths in August and in September — the first time that has happened in consecutive months. The only other month in which it even approached 50 percent was June 2004.

Casualties in Iraq have shifted toward citizen soldiers as their combat role has grown to historic levels. National Guard officials say their soldiers have been sent into combat in Iraq in numbers not previously seen in modern times — far more than were sent to Vietnam, where active-duty troops did the vast majority of the fighting.

Charles Krohn, a former Army deputy chief of public affairs, said the reservists are taking up the slack for the highly stressed active-duty Army.

"Decisions made years earlier made going to war in any significant way impossible without Guard and Reserve participation. But I can't imagine anyone postulated the situation we face today: We don't seem very anxious to bring back the draft and we can't get enough volunteers for a war that is not universally popular," Krohn said.

Forty-five percent of all Guard and Reserve deaths since the start of the war — 220 of the 487 total — occurred in the first nine months of 2005, according to Pentagon figures. The deadliest month was August, when 49 Guard and Reserve members died.

The mounting casualties among reservists in Iraq has been overshadowed by the attention focused on a rising overall U.S. death toll, now approaching 2,000. It complicates recruiting for the National Guard and Reserve, which often attract people who think of the military reservists' role as something other than front-line combat.

Gone are the days when the National Guard and Reserve served mainly as "rear-area" support, far from the front-line fighting.

In Iraq the front line is everywhere — on rural roads where Guard and Reserve soldiers drive supply trucks, at urban checkpoints, in remote villages and at major supply bases. Some units also have been attached to active-duty units with the specific mission of conducting offensive operations.

The casualties have contributed to what has been the most challenging time for the Guard and Reserve since the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973. In addition to fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and helping keep the peace in the Balkans, the Guard in particular was called to action in large numbers for rescue and relief from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

At one point this year more than half of the combat forces in Iraq were National Guard.

"That's a first," said Army Maj. Les Melnyk, historian for the Pentagon office that manages the Army and Air National Guard. "The Guard can't claim that (level of combat) for World War II or World War I — the other major wars we fought in. Never more than 50 percent of the combat forces were Guard."

At present, of the approximately 152,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, about half are reservists: 49,000 Army National Guard, 22,000 Army Reserve and 4,000 Marine Reserve, according to figures provided by those organizations.

The trend is almost certain to be reversed next year, when the active-duty Army is scheduled to make a proportionally larger contribution to the overall force. The number of National Guard brigades in Iraq, for example, is scheduled to drop next year from seven to two.

Since the Vietnam era, the military has given the Guard and Reserve more vital support functions like military police and engineers, so that any major conflict would involve more than just the active-duty force. Thus it was inevitable that a sizable portion of the force in Iraq would be Guard and Reserve; what has made the Iraq experience so different is the large numbers of reservists getting killed and wounded.

At least 300 soldiers of the National Guard, 78 of the Army Reserve and 93 of the Marine Corps Reserve, have died in the Iraq conflict. The Navy Reserve has lost 13, the Air Force Reserve three and the Air National Guard one. Together that is one-quarter of the total U.S death toll, which stood at 1,947 on Monday, by the Pentagon's count.

Lt. Gen. James Lovelace, the Army's deputy chief of staff for operations, said in an interview that the increased reliance on the Guard and Reserve in 2005 was deliberately planned to allow active-duty units like the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division to complete a reorganization before they returned to Iraq.

"It bought us the time we needed," Lovelace said.