From uucp Wed Oct 27 16:00 EDT 1993 >From jd Wed Oct 27 15:58:29 EDT 1993 remote from hogpa.att.com Received: from hogpa.att.com by hopper.acs.virginia.edu.ACS.Virginia.EDU; Wed, 27 Oct 1993 16:00 EDT Received: from hogpd.ho.att.com by hogpa.ho.att.com (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA08027; Wed, 27 Oct 93 15:58:15 EDT Received: by hogpd.ho.att.com (4.1/6.0c-FWP); id AA06364; Wed, 27 Oct 93 15:58:29 EDT Date: Wed, 27 Oct 93 15:58:29 EDT From: jd@hogpa.att.com Message-Id: <9310271958.AA06364@hogpd.ho.att.com> To: att!hopper.acs.virginia.edu!jad Content-Type: text Content-Length: 8662 Status: OR Article 17753 of alt.conspiracy: Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.activism,alt.society.civil-liberty,alt.individualism,alt.censorship,misc.headlines,soc.culture.usa,misc.activism.progressive Path: cbnewsl!cbnewsk!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!rich From: jad@Turing.ORG (John DiNardo) Subject: Part II, Within America's Soul, Hitler is Victorious Message-ID: <1992Dec2.215728.15380@mont.cs.missouri.edu> Followup-To: alt.conspiracy Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Keywords: Within America's Soul, Hitler is Victorious Sender: news@mont.cs.missouri.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: pencil.cs.missouri.edu Organization: The Turing Project, Public Access Internet Host Date: Wed, 2 Dec 1992 21:57:28 GMT Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu Lines: 137 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (continuation) The "Pentagon Papers" released by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, offered a rare glimpse at the military's disinformation machine. The papers document the strategy of exaggerating Viet Cong dead to assure the U.S. public that the war was being won. Ellsberg offered the rationale. Military leaders, Ellsberg said in a telephone interview, "feel their responsibilities are so burdensome that this is the least of their problems. They lie so often they are usually terribly surprised when they are caught. They have the sense that the public doesn't mind them lying." When U.S. forces stormed into Panama in December, 1989 the press was sequestered until nearly all combat was completed. Reporters based their accounts on carefully crafted, military press releases. The Pentagon reported fierce resistance and said 314 Noriega troops died in battl. Two months after the invasion, the Pentagon quietly admitted to the Los Angeles Times, that only one- sixth of the "enemy dead" were soldiers. Thus, the U.S. military quietly admitted they had slaughtered hundreds more Panamanian civilians. Air Force personnel who participated in the invasion of Panama told me U.S. combat deaths during "Operation Just Cause" were heavily underreported. They said combat deaths were classified as "training accidents" to prevent embarrassing revelations that dozens of U.S. troops died by "friendly fire." Two Air Force privates, members of the 24th U.S. Air Force Supply Division, who scrubbed clean the corpses of servicemen killed during the invasion, insisted they had washed the blood of "at least 67" dead U.S. soldiers - nearly three times the official Pentagon figure of 23. "I personally counted 67 bodies and there could have been many more. After two days I got off the detail I couldn't take it anymore," one of the privates told me last summer. Remembering this, I fly to Dover. Chris, a young free-lance mortician, is working in the morgue's "Reconstructive Art" division. As I approach, he calmly dips a brush into a pool of pink paint and dabs a glob across the chalk-white nose of a dead soldier. The face is sutured in 14 places, he tells me. The rough bumps and gouges on the hardened skin are a valiant attempt to create a resemblance to a human face. As he squirts a stream of lighter fluid onto the plastic palette, Chris treats me like the new rookie on the team. We talk about weather, sports and any other topic. Anything, I think, just not the details of embalming. "How's the pay?" I ask. "It's piece work," Chris whispers. "I've never made so much money." I excuse myself and head to the bathroom stall. Crouched behind the closed door, I scribble notes. Whenever I am left alone, I scratch out another dead soldier's name, later I compare these names against the official Pentagon list. Several times during my visit, I am seated at a desk covered with more documents than I can possibly copy. A white greaseboard lists the bodies and which airline flight will jet them home. A posted memo describes how to punch in a code to enter the mortuary phone system. I see my signature on a form authorizing a FBI background check. Before the FBI results return, my mortuary tour begins. A blue-smocked morgue employee with a badge identifying him as an "Inspector" outlines the entire mortuary process. "Here the dead are fingerprinted," The Inspector, tells me, pointing to a small crowd of bored FBI agents. The fingerprints, dental x-rays, DNA samples and blood types are all used to positively identify the dead. That is logical, but why x-ray the entire body? I ask my tour guide. "Unexploded ordnances," he says grimly. I imagine an unsuspecting embalmer blown sky-high after boring into a hand grenade. We continue into the mortuary waiting room. Six bodies lay lined up, have they been embalmed or are they frozen? I can't tell, even the most glaring wounds don't ooze or drip. The soldiers all lay on their back, naked, except for the woman. Her vagina and breasts are slightly covered. Their eyes are shut, their wounds are not. Approximately half the dead I see are young African-American men. I gaze at one soldier's nearly intact sculpted body: Looks like a wight lifter, I think. Those robust, naked thighs could belong holes splotch the skin from his armpit to his hip. I can scarcely look at his face. His lips and tongue are peeled off and stuck to his throat. There are no teeth. During my one day visit, I see many bodies. Some without hands. Some without heads. Throughout the day, I quietly probe for answers to my primary question: how many U.S. soldiers have died in combat. At the end of my day, during an informal chat with a morgue secretary, I stumble upon my first clue that, once again, combat deaths are being underreported. "When the (combat) deaths aren't on TV," the worker tells me, "they say the death was a 'training accident'." She says the official Pentagon figures are really only one-fourth of the true combat death toll. She estimates the mortuary had processed "about 200" combat casualties. At the time - February 28 -the official Pentagon combat death toll stood at just 55, according to DoD spokeswoman Susan Hansen. My adrenaline spurts with the frenzy of a journalist about to feast upon a scoop. Ahhh, a scandal after all! As the reality that I cannot easily confirm her claims sinks in, I am equally struck by the triviality of the story. So what if another hundred or two hundred U.S. soldiers died by Iraqi machine gun fire and not the various truck accidents and helicopter crashes as reported? For every dead U.S. soldier being carefully reconstructed and shipped home, probably a thousand dead Iraqi's disappeared into the desert sand. The U.S. military has promised they will make no public attempt to estimate Iraqi casualties. It is a complicated task and it does not fit into their public relations agenda. Few media organizations are bothering to investigate Iraqi casualties, but the low-end estimates begin at 80,000 and the Iraqi civil war is just now beginning. After completing 7 months of military-led obedience lessons, the U.S. press remains paralyzed when faced with perhaps the war's most important story - the number of souls sacrificed on the alter of war. Who can now deny the Pentagon's other smashing victory - the triumph over the poorly organized forces previously known as the free press. ENDIT Jonathan Franklin is a free-lance reporter living in San Francisco. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, SPIN Magazine and the New York Times. Anyone wishing to share information about the coverup of U.S. casualties should call him: (415)-626-0309. A longer version of Franklin's mortuary adventures will appear in the May isue of SPIN. -- end of text -- ** End of text from cdp:mideast.gulf ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The America Public is evidently in dire need of the truth, for when the plutocracy feeds us sweet lies in place of the bitter truth that would evoke remedial action by the People, then we are in peril of sinking inextricably into despotism. So, please post the episodes of this ongoing series to other bulletin boards and post hardcopies in public places, both on and off campus. The need for concerned people to alert others to overshadowing dangers still exists as it did in the era of Paul Revere. That need is as enduring as society itself. John DiNardo