"Where are all the weapons of Mass Destruction?" Richard Dvorin demanded in his letter [to the president]. "Where are the stockpiles of Chemical and Biological weapons?" His son's life [Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin], he wrote, "has been snuffed out in a meaningless war."
His is not the only military family to think so. In suburban Cleveland a few days later, the Rev. Tandy Sloan tuned in to the "Meet the Press" interview with President Bush and felt "disgust." His 19-year-old son, Army Pvt. Brandon Sloan, was killed when his convoy was ambushed last March. "A human being can make mistakes," the Rev. Sloan says of the president. "But if you intentionally mislead people, that's another thing."
In Fullerton, Calif., paralegal student Kimberly Huff, whose Army reservist husband recently returned from Iraq, makes a similar point with a wardrobe of homemade protest T-shirts that say things like "Support Our Troops, Impeach Bush."
The number of military families that oppose Operation Iraqi Freedom, though never measured, is probably small. But a nascent antiwar movement has begun to find a toehold among parents, spouses and other relatives of active-duty, reserve and National Guard troops.
A group called Military Families Speak Out -- which will figure prominently in marches and vigils at Dover Air Force Base, Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the White House next week -- says more than 1,000 families have signed up online and notes that new members join daily. Other outspoken family members -- Dvorin, for example -- have never heard of the group but, for a variety of reasons, share its founders' conviction that the war is a "reckless military misadventure."
Most frequently cited, when military families explain their antiwar sentiments, is the absence to date of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "They'd have these inspections and they'd find nothing," says Jenifer Moss, 29, of Lawton, Okla. Her husband, Army Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, died in November when a missile downed his Chinook helicopter, leaving her with three children and the belief that "he was sent out there on a pretense."
They are also angry at the Bush administration's insistence that its policies are nonetheless justified. Cherice Johnson's husband, Navy Corpsman Michael Vann Johnson Jr., was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade last March. "I'd love to say I back [the president] 100 percent, but I can't," she says, weeping during a telephone interview. "How many more people are going to die because he can't say, 'I'm sorry, I made a terrible mistake'?"
The confusion and pain that these families are feeling is one of the chief reasons the current administration must not only be voted out of office, but held accountable for their policies. The noble calling that once motivated members of these families to defend our country has been violated by the crony capitalism of the oil industry and the misguided political ambitions of a handful of neoconservatives who launched this war without a justifiable or verifiable basis.
The thousand families that have signed up online so far probably include those of most of the 579 Americans killed in Iraq as of yesterday.
As military and congressional investigators continue to pore over Halliburton's books, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is raising questions about cost estimates that fluctuate by as much as $700 million or that rely on information from sacked subcontractors.
The House Government Reform Committee is scheduled to quiz a slate of Pentagon officials today about the military's contracting woes in Iraq.
Waxman and other Democrats on the panel want the military brass to address questions raised by auditors at the Defense Contract Audit Agency in a Dec. 31 "flash report" concerning a $2.7 billion Halliburton proposal to provide logistical support for U.S. troops.
Those auditors, Waxman said, found that Halliburton violated federal acquisition rules by failing to provide "current, accurate and complete data regarding subcontractor costs."
"This new information ... depicts a situation where costs are virtually uncontrolled, and Halliburton can overcharge the taxpayer by phenomenal sums," Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Committee, wrote in a memo to his Democratic colleagues on the panel.
$700 million in "fluctuations" leaves a fair amount of latitude for crookedness and lying by the civilian contractor of a war orchestrated by its CEO.
American teenagers who take the pledge to remain virgins until they marry have almost the same rate of sexually transmitted disease as other young people, a new study of adolescent behaviour says.
The finding destroys a key rationale for the abstinence crusade - that it prevents disease - and poses a strong challenge to a social engineering project that has been embraced by the White House.
The eight-year study of 12,000 young people by two American sociologists found that the graduates of abstinence programmes were nearly as likely as other young people to catch sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhoea or chlamydia.
Other findings, yet to be published, also suggest that abstinence programmes do not prevent early pregnancy, Hannah Bruckner, a sociologist at Yale University and co-author of the study, said.
That challenges the very underpinnings of a movement that has attracted 2.5 million American teenagers in recent years, and which is endorsed by church organisations and the Christian right.
Few of those teenagers continue to save themselves for marriage - 88% have sex before they reach the altar. However, the study found they start having sex later and have fewer partners than other teenagers.
Even so, Dr Bruckner said she was initially surprised to discover that there was virtually no statistical difference in their susceptibility to infection. That was because such teenagers are less likely to use condoms, and are less aware of sexually transmitted infections, largely because they have been indoctrinated to believe they are not going to have sex.
Under US law, abstinence programmes risk losing federal funding if they stray into the realm of sex education. Church-based abstinence programmes are openly hostile to condoms and preach that they do not guard against disease.
They can deny reality as loudly as they like, but sex among head-burying ostriches still carries a big whoops! factor.
They've monitored voting in Haiti; now they're on their way to El Salvador. Their next stops? Jacksonville, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
For the first time, international monitors will be in the United States to make sure votes are cast and counted correctly. Members of the Catholic peace movement Pax Christi announced Monday that they will post monitors at polling places in four Florida during the Nov. 2 general election.
"We have assisted groups in other nations who fear that their voices will not be heard and that the powerful will manipulate the process to suit their own aspirations unless the eyes of the world are watching," said Dave Robinson, national coordinator of Pax Christi USA. "But as evident in the elections of 2000, particularly in the state of Florida, we in the United States have our own difficulties in assuring an election atmosphere that is transparent, open, honest and free of controversy."
Presidential brother Neil Bush -- putting aside remnants of a scandalous divorce, paternity questions and a scorned ex-wife -- married Maria Andrews Saturday night in the Memorial-area mansion of Rania and Jamal Daniel, longtime Bush family friends.
Close to 150 guests joined the newlyweds after a small family ceremony that included former President George Bush and Barbara Bush, parents of the groom. President George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush did not attend.
Standing with their father for the nuptials were Pierce, 17, and Ashley, 14. His eldest daughter, model and Princeton University student Lauren, did not attend.
Joining Andrews in the ceremony were her two older children, Elizabeth, 12, and Pace Andrews, 10.
The cocktail-attire evening included a seated dinner and dancing.
Neil Bush met Andrews several years ago when she was working as a volunteer in Barbara Bush's Houston office. They became engaged in December during a romantic dinner in a French chateau.
Meanwhile, his fake cowboy brother kisses up to real cowboys who apparently can't tell the difference between the one brother's pandering and the other's philandering enough to know that neither of them shares an iota of their own values.
And for dinner Dubya will take another $1 million on the way to his fundraising goal of $170 million for an unopposed campaign within his party.
Even now, Enron still plays an important financial role in the Bush campaign. The new Pioneer ($200,000+ donors) "list includes investor Peter Coneway, former Enron executive Nancy Kinder and businessman Fred Zeidman."
No word on where radioactive Neil and Maria are honeymooning.
