'Moral Clarity' falls Dumb before those who have lost Children to War

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0707-13.htm

Published on Wednesday, July 7, 2004 by the Globe and Mail / Canada

The Mother of All Anti-War Forces

Washington's talk of Moral Clarity falls Dumb before those who have lost Children in its Wars

by Naomi Klein

There is a remarkable scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 when Lila Lipscomb talks with an anti-war activist outside the White House about the death of her 26-year-old son in Iraq. A pro-war passerby doesn't like what she overhears and announces, "This is all staged!"

Ms. Lipscomb turns to the woman, her voice shaking with rage, and says: "My son is not a stage. He was killed in Karbala, April 2. It is not a stage. My son is dead." Then she walks away and wails, "I need my son."

Watching Ms. Lipscomb doubled over in pain on the White House lawn, I was reminded of other mothers who have taken the loss of their children to the seat of power and changed the fate of wars. During Argentina's dirty war, a group of women whose children had been disappeared by the military regime gathered every Thursday in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. At a time when all public protest was banned, they would walk silently in circles, wearing white headscarves and carrying photographs of their missing children.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo revolutionized human-rights activism by transforming maternal grief from a cause for pity into an unstoppable political force. The generals couldn't attack the mothers openly, so they launched fierce covert operations against their organization. But the mothers kept walking, playing a significant role in the dictatorship's eventual collapse.

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Last week, California resident Nadia McCaffrey defied the Bush administration by inviting news cameras to photograph the arrival of her son's casket from Iraq. The White House has banned photography of flag-draped coffins arriving at air force bases, but because Patrick McCaffrey's remains were flown into the Sacramento International Airport, his mother was able to invite the photographers inside. "I don't care what wants," Ms. McCaffery declared, telling her local newspaper, "Enough war."

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1. McCaffrey defied President Bush by allowing the media to view the coffin

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=537625

The son who came home for the Fourth of July
Last week Nadia McCaffrey defied President Bush by allowing the media to view the coffin of her son, Patrick, killed in action in Iraq. Andrew Buncombe was invited to attend his funeral in Tracy, California
03 July 2004


The photographs of Patrick McCaffrey laid out on the table at the front of the reception hall were the record of a life cut short. There were pictures of Patrick as a young boy, a head of curly brown hair, posing in his judo outfit. There was one of him dressed to play American football and another, taken a few years later, of Patrick wearing a tuxedo and probably heading out to the high school prom. There was one of him with his family - a wife, a little girl and a son so proud that his father was a member of the California National Guard that he had asked for his own set of dog-tags.

Finally there was a photograph of Patrick with his unit in Iraq. It had been taken shortly before the ambush in which Patrick was killed. In the picture he is laughing with his friends. He was 34-years-old and - according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count website - the 848th American soldier to die in Iraq.

"He was the life-saver in the unit," said Joyce Kilzono, one of several hundred friends attending the memorial reception, as she pointed at the photograph. "He looked after the others. That man there is my brother-in-law. He had been dehydrated and Patrick had been looking after him. He was caring for people right up until the end." Mrs Kilzono lowered her voice, turned and added: "There are a lot of us Americans who do not agree with what is going on over there."


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[G_j]

2. evening kick