Thursday, March 11, 2004

The Forgotten Soldiers of Operation "Iraqi Freedom": "The U.S. Air Force confides that it has flown approximately 12,000 wounded soldiers into Andrews Air Force Base over the past 9 months. With the severity of injuries sustained, it seems like the Pentagon's reduced estimates are meant to camouflage a scandal that could cost George Bush his re-election.

"'They come here [to Walter Reed Hospital]19 or 20 old and when I see them leaving with missing limbs - I've seen up to 3 limbs gone off people and I don't think in our generation, we've seen this amount of harm done to young people', explained Major General Delaune on public radio in Minnesota. 'During the Gulf War, there were about 3 soldiers wounded for every death. In the current Iraq war, there are 7 wounded for every death', says an article titled 'New Technologies and Medical Practices Save Lives in Iraq' in a Knight-Ridder newspaper. The facts support this statement: the Kevlar vests the soldiers now wear save lives, not limbs. England's newspaper The Guardian reports that the medical personnel, overwhelmed, work 70-80 hours a week, and according to CBS, Washington's largest military hospital has had to borrow beds from its cancer ward to meet the swollen needs of its prosthetics ward. Still the hospital can't handle the load, and several wounded soldiers are being put up in a nearby hotel."

"At Baghdad International Airport, there were 15 I.E.D.'s every two weeks. Each time there was an explosion, the whole compound would get shut down. The computers and the telephones would go off all of a sudden… And we would know that a soldier had just been killed 'cause they didn't want anyone to be able to reach the family before the Army could."

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