And yet these two treasonous idiots, along with "hundreds of others from the Ithaca area" continue to oppose the war and the White House's motives for commencing it.
Posted on 08/29/2003 5:54:14 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
When words aren't enough to describe loss and trauma, images have the power to speak for us. This we witnessed in the moments following the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Most Americans sat transfixed and horrified in front of their televisions. Without access to television or the photographs published in newspapers and magazines, the destruction and the chaos of 9/11 would have been virtually impossible to imagine.
For Ithaca-area residents George Sapio and Maura Stephens, who have made two humanitarian trips to Iraq this year, the loss of any innocent life resulting from political circumstances is tragic. Our nation grieved for the thousands of innocent lives lost on September 11th. Still, the majority of Americans can't fathom the realities of daily tragedy and trauma associated with war.
Sapio and Stephens introduce us to the Iraqis they met in their collaborative effort Collateral Damage: Photographs of the Iraqi People. The book, published after their first trip to Iraq by Sapio's multimedia company, Bad Dog! Studios, speaks volumes for the voiceless in a country savaged by years of sanctions and war.
Seeing in Order to Believe
Stephens, who worked at Newsweek for 19 years (where she and Sapio met) has spent the majority of her writing and editing career in the news media. Relying on the on-line versions of The New York Times and The Washington Post as well as alternative sources for information, Stephens says that over time she began to notice major discrepancies in what she read and what people told her they watched on the evening news.
The differences became sharply distinct, she says, when talk from the Bush Administration leaned further and further into waging war with Iraq. Hoping voices for peace would be heard through the war drumming on Pennsylvania Avenue, Sapio and Stephens, like hundreds of others from the Ithaca area, attended a massive peace rally and march held in Washington, D.C. on January 15. Growing frustrated with media inconsistencies and with Americans' general lack of knowledge about Iraq's people and culture - including their own at the time - the couple set out for Baghdad just two weeks after the D.C. demonstration.
Organized through Global Exchange, an international human rights coalition, their trip focused on learning as much as they could about the Iraqi people and on joining humanitarian efforts.
They visited schools, hospitals and orphanages, all affected by sanctions placed on Iraq in August of 1990. Since the start of the sanctions, which are U.N.-imposed and U.S.-mandated in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, emergency medical supplies and equipment and educational materials have been scarce. Without water sanitation and properly functioning sewage systems, diseases such as cholera, typhus and dysentery thrive in Iraq, which was once described as practically first world by the U.N.
In e-mails to friends and family at home, Stephens noted these third-world conditions and pled for donations of healthcare and medical supplies and equipment. Sapio, a photographer and multimedia artist, packed 40 rolls of film to document the lives of people they'd meet during the course of their 11-day stay. Halfway through the trip he realized 40 rolls weren't enough to capture the hindered lives of everyday Iraqis. After witnessing the effects of sanctions, which were ordered shortly after the Gulf War, the couple felt an urgent need for Americans to understand that Iraq is not "a country full of little Saddams running around with machine guns," as Stephens puts it.
To explain the use of the term "collateral damage" in the book's title, Sapio says, "It's a euphemism. The army and the government use it in lieu of saying, 'Innocent people just like you are going to get bombed.' "
An Iraqi child's face beams from the first page of Collateral Damage and his hopeful smile clashes against a definition from the Department of Defense. According to their Dictionary of Military Terms, collateral damage is the: "Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack."
Statistics listed on the inside cover starkly highlight the book's message of suffering.
In planning for humanitarian needs before the U.S. invasion, the U.N. estimated 500,000 civilian casualties. The U.N. also projected millions more would lose their homes and lack access to food and clean water. A little more than a month after Sapio and Stephens returned to the U.S., the first bombs rained down on Iraq. Collateral Damage chronicles people whose lives would shift into an unpredictable instability within a few months.
Revisiting a Country in Chaos
Despite potential danger, Sapio and Stephens returned to Iraq in July to write a report for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), a humanitarian and human rights advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
They found upheaval. Baghdad, the country's capitol and U.S. military hotspot, has become especially volatile. The Palestine Hotel, located half a block from where the couple stayed on their first trip, was destroyed in the bombing campaign on Baghdad, wounding and killing journalists based there.
The restaurant Sapio and Stephens had frequented had been targeted when it was believed Saddam Hussein was eating lunch there. Most of the children featured in Collateral Damage had died from lack of available cancer treatment. Countless families lost their homes and means of income.
For Sapio, the most lasting image during their return visit was one he didn't take with his camera. As he was about to photograph three Iraqi men posing with their hands displaying the sign for peace, a young girl picked up an unexploded mortar shell and posed in front of his camera. He refused to take her picture. "I asked her in Arabic to please put that down," he says, remembering the intensity of the moment.
Finding unexploded shells - sometimes hundreds of them littering the street - and children playing with them was not uncommon, as homeless families had been building shelters in deserted military fields. Sapio and Stephens met one such family. There were 14 members in the family, all living in a small, one-room shelter thrown together with mud and salvaged bricks. With no means to support themselves financially, they were evicted when they could no longer pay rent. They slept on thin mats on the floor.
"I said, 'How do you sleep like this?'" Stephens recalls, exasperated, "and they said, 'We get like worms.' So they curl up among one another. It was so crowded."
Knowing the family will again be homeless in October when the rainy season washes away the mud holding the bricks together, Stephens is still haunted by their situation.
The Saddam Hussein iconography omnipresent during the couple's first visit had been dismantled by the time of their second trip. Gone are the statues and pictures of the dictator that once wallpapered the city. With the symbols of oppression behind them, the people now openly discuss their political problems and differences in viewpoints.
"In that way," Stephens says, "things have improved vastly."
Adds Sapio, "It's strange, the vast array of opinions [about the ousting of Saddam Hussein]. Most [Iraqi] people say, 'Thank you for getting rid of Saddam.' And some say, 'We want Saddam back.' You ask them why and they say, 'When Saddam was here we had running water; we had infrastructure; we had electricity; we had law; we had education. We actually had a working society-which we don't have now.' "
Heeding the Disaray
Disappointment and desperation is pervasive among Iraqis as they have yet to see promises made by the U.S. government to quickly rebuild their country's infrastructure fulfilled.
Long lines for fuel propel some to spend the night in their cars, waiting for the pumps to open the next morning. The long lines are exacerbated by the on-and-off electricity, which the gas pumps need to work. Since generators require gasoline to run, they can't often be counted on to provide backup. Especially unnerving for the couple during the second trip, remark Sapio and Stephens, was the nightly barrage of gunfire and helicopters. Though there is an 11 p.m. curfew in order, the couple did not leave their hotel after 6 p.m. for fear of the rampant muggings and shootings.
As troops continue to come under daily attack, soldiers track anyone moving with their guns, which the couple also found intimidating.
To facilitate dialogue with the troops, Sapio and Stephens carried press passes. "They're in the most untenable position imaginable," Sapio says. Stephens sympathetically elaborates. "They're in full combat gear. It's 120 degrees-in the shade. They're wearing metal helmets [and] carrying machine guns."
"And they're scared," states Sapio, "because they're being picked off [in the daily attacks]."
A Community United
With the fall of the Iraqi government came not only instability in infrastructure, but also indescribable inflation. To substantiate their humanitarian mission, the couple relied on increased fundraising to make the second trip possible. Through generous donations - including a $2,000 matching fund from the Tompkins County Network for Peace and Justice - Sapio and Stephens raised $13,000.
In addition to money - a lot of which the couple gave away to Iraqi families - many individuals and non-profit organizations also contributed healthcare and medical supplies.
Sapio and Stephens say their humanitarian work could not have extended as far without the support of the Ithaca community.
"Ithacans are really generous, caring people, and we are so glad to be part of this community," says Stephens. Since Iraqi schools and universities have been looted and emptied of their materials and libraries, Stephens is planning to take up collections to replace some of the loss. The School of Music and Ballet in Baghdad seeks ballet clothing for children ages seven to 16, along with sheet music, music stands and instruments are being sought. The University of Mosul needs entirely refurbished language labs and is desperately seeking textbooks and supplies.
For donations of five dollars or more, copies of Collateral Damage can still be found at Wownet Digital Café and The Bookery. The book, not published for profit, can also be downloaded from the Web for free at www.gsapio.com. Sapio and Stephens want the message of Iraqi suffering to infect Americans, as it was not too long ago that the U.S. sought sympathy from the global community.
To describe the power Collateral Damage has in explaining the Iraqi plight, Sapio simply says, "These are the faces. These are the kids; innocent people. And this is what happens to them."
George Sapio and Maura Stephens are available for presentations beginning in September. For information on making donations, please contact Maura Stepehens at 607-274-3829.
And yet these two treasonous idiots, along with "hundreds of others from the Ithaca area" continue to oppose the war and the White House's motives for commencing it.
I thought the UN Oil for Food program was designed to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people.
Naaaaaaah, you are right Joe Conason and Eric Alterman. There is no LW bias in the mianstream media.
And Michael Jackson and his "We Are The World" idiots thought they were feeding starving Ethiopians. Lib'rals are constitutionally incapable of seeing the world as it is, only as they it should be. That's why so many of them can't function in the real world.
And where are the billions they obviously set aside for this? Are they just sitting on it? If they planned for this, as stated, what were their plans and why aren't they helping with the infrastructure problems. I guess it is as it has always been the UN talks big and then leaves it ti the USA to do the job - like replacing Saddam.
Yes
Another university that is favored by the downstate NY limo liberal elite? Us upstate farmers can't afford to send our children there.
Well, I'll defend it on this. The Ag School is part of the SUNY system, and is as affordable as any other state school in NYS.
I'd bet its a Hillary town
Major league. She was there yesterday, in fact.
Yeah, they are perfect leftists: First they work in media, now they work in academia.
But...they intented for the food and money to go to those poor people! That's all that matters.
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