Deep Scars

Congressional hearings can be dry, dull, affairs, but the Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq is riveting:

So, in the 2004 study, I went and I led the study, and I paid a guy $200 to smuggle me into Iraq. So I flew to Jordan, and gave him 200 bucks, and he smuggled me in. He had really dark tinted windows. And so he smuggled me across the border—even though they searched the car, somehow we made it—and we went through a checkpoint in Fallujah as we were coming in.

This guy who smuggled me in—he’s a professional smuggler. He’s a tough guy. He’d been in the military 21 years, the U.S. had come, and now he was suddenly unemployed and driving a car. As we drove past Abu Ghraib prison—I’m lying on the floor in the back, and he goes, “Abu Ghraib! Abu Ghraib!” And I sort of looked up, and my driver was up front, and I said, “Do you mean the prison?” And he looked back over his shoulder, and he was weeping.

You know, there are consequences to every American family that’s lost a loved one that dwarf the economic concerns. And the notion that there might be hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families with scars that deep should scare us profoundly, I think. Les Roberts, Associate Professor, Clinical Public Health, Columbia University

The hearing looks into the recent Lancet study which pegs the number of Iraqi deaths at over 650,000 since the start of George W. Bush’s foolhardy, illegal, and pointless war in that country. When the study was released in October it was greeted by howls of protests by both the U.S. and U.K. governments, however as time has past the conclusions reached in the report have only gained additional credibility and currency among the press and many policy makers.

P.S.: Lets not forget: the Iraq war is a war Stephen Harper wanted Canada to support.