Fallujah's Children

 #Laura Gottdiener, "Fallujah's Children," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

An ad hoc registry was the beginning of  a "yearslong, unfinished quest to document and investigate the  most controversial medical mystery of the Iraq War: an alleged increase in birth defects that local doctors say began after the United States invaded the country in 2003, and plagues the city of Fallujah today." "But the rise of industrialized warfare in the 20th century, with the introduction of chemical weapons and the threat of nuclear attacks, brought new toxic exposures and the possibility of terrifying genetic consequences." "The Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange says as many as 3 million children across four generations have suffered from cancers, neural damage, reproductive problems, and other illnesses linked to the toxic chemical." 

A study published in the 'Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America', "found that an estimated 14 percent of infants delivered at a hospital [in Fallujah] had congenital disorders -- more than twice the global average." 

"Depleted uranium is an extremely dense and wildly radioactive heavy metal that was first used during the 1991 Gulf War, when the US military sprayed approximately 1 million depleted uranium rounds across  Iraq." "Yet some of the Pentagon's own research in the 1990s suggested links between depleted uranium,  cancer and congenital disorders. Specifically, the documents reveal that in March and April of 2003, the US military fired about 4,000 30-millimeter rounds, or 1.3 tons of depleted uranium munitions in Fallujah -- only a small fraction of the 69 tons that the US military fired across Iraq that year." Adding to this record of toxic material dumped on Iraq, five years after the start of the war, the 'Times of London' investigation  revealed that the U.S. military had generated over 10 million pounds of toxic waste, and that it was abandoning hazardous material in dump sites along main roads. 

There is another candidate for the cause of the congenital disorders of the newborn in Fallujah: "By  2003, UNICEF said nearly 60 percent of the Iraqi people was fully dependent on food rations, meaning that these nutritional deficiencies affected more than half of the population." 

In the final analyses, at least in the case of Fallujah, it does "force one to reconsider the search for a single toxic substance and instead grapple with the possibility that 21st century urban warfare, in and of itself, might unleash the intergenerational damage that we are only beginning to understand."

#Kali Holloway, "The Trauma Presidency," The Nation, November 16, 2020.

"Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly gave border prosecutors their marching orders, declaring: 'We need to take away children.' Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG at the time, ordered US attorneys who had declined to pursue cases involving toddlers to make 'no categorical exemption' in cases merely 'because of the age of the child.' " "At least three Trump officials were warned that callously breaking up migrant families 'entails significant potential for traumatic psychological injury to the child,' according to testimony from Public Health Service Commission Corps Cmdr. Jonathan White." 

#Eesha Pandit, "A History of Abuse," The Nation, November 16, 2020. 

"The [migrant] women interviewed by Project South reported horrifying conditions at a [Georgia migrant] center, as well as widespread medical neglect." In the interviews, evidence was found of "sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, lack of prenatal care for pregnant women, a lack of clean drinking water, and rampant use of solitary confinement at the facility,' said Azadeh Shahshahani, Project South's legal and advocacy director." Sterilization was the solution for those considered to be dangerous.

"In 2013, the organization 'Reveal', reported that from 2006 to 2010, at least 148 inmates in two California prisons were sterilized without proper state approval or oversight, and there might be 100 more such incidents dating back to the late 1990s."

#Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Last Round," The New Yorker, November 2, 2020. 

In the dueling townhalls with Joe Biden and President Trump being individually interviewed, Trump reprised the things that 'Americans won't have a country' if Biden was elected president. It wouldn't have a border wall, steel, petroleum, eminent domain, and his reelection. Later in the debate, Trump said that if a President Biden secured a public option, "This whole country will come down." He used the occasion to present a bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America, with triumphs invented and disasters ignored. 

When asked how he would make sure that preexisting conditions would be preserved, he replied simply that 'preexisting conditions always stay.' As for the more than 500 children taken from their families and now can't be reunited -- it is well over 600 now -- he said that their plight was the fault of 'coyotes,' 'cartels,' and 'gangs.' On the subject of race, he repeated that he had done more for Black Americans than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.' Almost all of the decreases in the unemployment rates of African Americans, Hispanics and women after the financial meltdown culminating in October 2008, came while Barack Obama was president.

Anybody who didn't share his timeline for distribution of a vaccine by the end of the year, doesn't 'share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done.' Trump claimed that 'ninety-nine per cent of Americans would survive the virus,' as if vulnerable Americans were a rounding error.

'New York City, by the way,'  Trump informed the audience, 'is a ghost town.' Drawing another dire picture, as he referred to Biden, he said 'Take a look at what's happening with your friend in Michigan, where her husband's the only one allowed to do anything. It's been like a prison.'