Friday, February 27

Still Think The Occupation's Going Well, Senator Daschle?

This is heartbreaking, disgraceful and horrific. My vote automatically goes to the Democratic candidate who travels to Iraq and brings back a firsthand account of what he sees there. This is what will never be seen by Preznit Giv Me Turkee:
Dying of neglect: the state of Iraq's children's hospitals

In Iraq's hospitals, children are dying because of shockingly poor sanitation and a shortage of medical equipment. In Baghdad's premier children's hospital, Al-Iskan, sewage drips from the roof of the premature babies' ward, leaking from waste pipes above.

In the leukaemia ward, the lavatories overflow at times, spreading filthy water across the floor that carries potentially lethal infection.

Rubbish is piled on the stairs and in the corridors: old broken bits of machinery, discarded toilet cisterns, babies' cots filled with mountains of unwanted paperwork. The fire escape is blocked with discarded razor wire.

Nearby lie blankets still black with the blood of Iraqi soldiers wounded during the war - for months, they must have been fetid breeding grounds for disease.

This is the reality of life in Iraq under American occupation. Ten months after the fall of Saddam, the invasion that was supposed to have transformed the lives of ordinary Iraqis has done little for the children in Al-Iskan Hospital.

Of the billions of dollars the US is spending in Iraq, little seems to have found its way to Al-Iskan. In a country that sits on top of the second largest proven oil reserves in the world, children are dying in hospital beds because of a shortage of such basic equipment as oxygen cylinders.