TORONTO (Aug. 13) – The date was Sept. 12, 2001, but Benemar “Ben” Benatta was clueless about the death and destruction one day earlier.
About a week before, Canadian officials had stopped Benatta as he entered the country from Buffalo to seek political asylum. On that Sept. 11, he was quietly transferred to a U.S. immigration lockup where a day passed before sullen FBI agents told him what the rest of the world already knew: terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
It slowly dawned on Benatta that his pedigree – a Muslim man with a military background – made him a target in the frenzied national dragnet that soon followed. The FBI didn’t accuse him of being a terrorist, at least not outright. But agents kept asking if he could fly an airplane.
He told them he couldn’t. It made no difference.
“They gave me a feeling that I was Suspect No. 1,” he said in a recent interview.
The veiled accusations and vehement denials would continue for nearly five years – despite official findings in 2001 that he had no terrorist links and in 2003 that authorities had violated his rights by colluding to keep him in custody.
Of the estimated 1,200 mostly Arab and Muslim men detained nationwide as potential suspects or witnesses in the Sept. 11 investigation, Benatta would earn a dubious distinction: Human rights groups say the former Algerian air force lieutenant was locked up the longest.
His Kafkaesque journey through the American justice system concluded July 20 when a deal was finalized for his return to Canada. In the words of his lawyer, the idea was to “turn back the clock” to when he first crossed the border.
But time did not stand still for Benatta: The clock ran for 1,780 days. The man detained at 27 was now 32.
“I say to myself from time to time, maybe what happened … it was some kind of dream,” he said. “I never believed things like that could happen in the United States.”
In a nation reeling from unthinkable horrors inflicted by an unconventional enemy, it could. And did.
Sporting a gray T-shirt and cargo shorts on a sizzling summer day, Benatta eased his muscular frame into a white plastic chair in the backyard of a Toronto halfway house for immigrant asylum-seekers. He sipped lemonade, then paused to taste freedom.
“You start to look around and take in everything – the wind in your face, the breeze – everything,” he said.
The youngest of 10 children in a middle-class family, Benatta recalled always wanting to be military man like his father. But after he joined the air force, he grew disillusioned. Algerian soldiers, he said, were abusive toward civilians. And militant Muslims were out for blood.
“I was in harm’s way in my country,” he said.
Benatta entered a six-month training program for foreign air force engineers in Virginia in December 2000, plotting from the start to desert and flee to Canada. In June 2001, he stole out of a hotel the night before his scheduled flight back to Algeria. He lived briefly in New York before arriving Sept. 5 on Canada’s doorstep.
A week later, Canadian authorities were escorting him back over the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, where they turned him over to U.S. immigration officers. On Sept. 16, U.S. marshals took him into custody, put him on a small jet and flew him to a federal jail in Brooklyn that became a clearing house for detainees who were labeled “of interest” to the FBI following the Sept. 11 attacks.
One remark by a marshal stuck in his head: “Where you’re going, you won’t need shoes anymore.”
In Brooklyn, he was locked down – minus his shoes – 24 hours a day between FBI interrogations. When he continued to deny any involvement in the attacks, agents threatened to send him back to Algeria. As a deserter, he was certain he would be tortured.
“That was all my thinking all of the time – they were signing my execution warrant,” he said.
Prison guards, he said, dispensed humiliation in steady doses – rapping on his cell door every half hour to interrupt his sleep, stepping on his leg shackles hard enough to scar his ankles, locking him in an outdoor exercise cage despite freezing temperatures, conducting arbitrary strip searches.
The alleged abuses would have been bad enough.
But as a judge eventually pointed out, something else was amiss: Benatta was never charged with a crime.
The FBI grillings stopped sometime in November 2001, when an internal report was prepared saying he was cleared. On paper, he was no longer a terror suspect.
No one bothered to tell him.
December turned to March with Benatta still under lockdown in Brooklyn, without any contact with the outside world. “Each day, with that kind of conditions, is like a year,” he said.
Finally, in April, he received word that he would be transferred to Buffalo to face federal charges of carrying a phony ID when first detained. Benatta was denied bail while he fought the case. But for the first time he was allowed into the general population of federal defendants housed at an immigration detention center.
He also had access to the news, and was shocked by the images accompanying anniversary stories about the Sept. 11 attacks.
“It was the first time I’d really seen what happened,” he said.
It wasn’t until the second anniversary of the attacks that U.S. Magistrate H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr., in a bluntly worded ruling, found that Benatta’s detainment for a deportation hearing was “a charade.”
Though terrible, the Sept. 11 attacks “do not constitute an acceptable basis for abandoning our constitutional principles and rule of law by adopting an ‘end justifies the means’ philosophy,” Schroeder wrote. Based on that decision, another judge tossed out the case on Oct. 3, 2003.
“That gave me so much hope,” Benatta said. “For me, it’s like (the judge) had so much nerves. He gave me some kind of hope in the judicial system all over again.”
His hopes were dashed by an ensuing standoff: Benatta demanded asylum. Immigration authorities wanted him deported for overstaying his visa.
An immigration court first set bail at $25,000, then ruled he should stay behind bars indefinitely – a situation a United Nations human rights group decried as a “de facto prison sentence.” Most asylum seekers are released pending the outcome of their cases.
It took another two years before a Manhattan attorney, Catherine M. Amirfar, found a solution: She convinced Canadian authorities to let her client apply for asylum there without jailing him.
“Canada was willing to take him back and turn back the clock five years,” she said. “Of course, Benemar will never get those five years back.”
The last detainee was deported in his prison smock without an apology. He remembers cold stares when he ate his first meal at Wendy’s and went to a mall to buy clothes.
Today, there’s no more soul-numbing confinement. But he’s still caught in waiting game, this time to see whether Canada will grant him asylum – a decision at least six months away. He also wonders if he can regain enough spirit to start a new life.
“Now I’m not the same person,” he said. “When I came to the United States, I was optimistic. I had so much energy. That’s not the case now.”
Veterans of Iraq wars battle Pentagon over depleted uranium
Aug 12, 2006
NEW YORK – It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills —morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction. Valium for his nerves.
Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more before the day is done.
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin. Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.
There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military’s new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.
In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist. He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.
“I’m just a zombie walking around,” he says.
Billions of pounds of suspect metal
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon’s arsenal of it — thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.
A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.
Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he’d never experienced in his previously healthy life.
‘We all felt sick’
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.
“We all had migraines. We all felt sick,” Reed says. “The doctors said, ‘It’s all in your head.’ ”
Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn’t.
Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They’d brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.
“We got on the Internet,” Reed said, “and we started researching depleted uranium.”
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
Tests come up positive, but …
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey’s Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.
The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.
The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.
Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. “Their test just isn’t as sophisticated,” he said. “And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn’t one. They’ve lied to us all along.”
The VA’s testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.
A radioactive issue
The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.
“The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all,” said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. “Then you have far-left groups that … declare it a crime against humanity.”
Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.
Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.
Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous _ not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.
Weapon in political arsenal
A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.
“I’ve been working on this since ’93 and I’ve just given up hope,” he said. “I’ve spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials … who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes.”
At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.
“The bottom line is it’s more hazardous than the Pentagon admits,” Fahey said, “but it’s not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is. And there’s a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans.”
Animal research shows side-effects
There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.
Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.
Iraqi authorities “found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities,” the U.N. reported.
Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.
In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.
Feds rely on tiny sample group
Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.
Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.
The study group’s size is controversial _ far too small, say experts including Fahey _ and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.
It has found “no clinically significant” health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.
Critics say the VA has downplayed participants’ health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.
So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government’s spending of at least $300 million.
About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed’s unit.
Invited to check the boxes
Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.
But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.
But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they’d been exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?
It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.
Echoes of Agent Orange
It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.
It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.
In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.
It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses — comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?
The answer, according to the committee, is no.
“Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal,” stated its December 2005 report. “Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective.”
And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.
Struck down by a ghost
Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.
His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp — more like a hitch in his get-along.
It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.
Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.
At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker’s Island prison.
He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.
Fighting a second battle
According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn’t get anything of the kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans’ groups.
Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians’ offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.
But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.
Some days he feels fine. “Some days I can’t get out of bed,” he said from his home in Colorado.
Now 29, he’s had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke — one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.
“Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it,” he said. “Except I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”
After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.
He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of “non-related conditions.” He knows he was exposed to DU.
“A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles.”
Old before their time
No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed’s, is self-taught from the Internet.
Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn’t feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.
He’d really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.
“I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they’re in as good as shape as a professional athlete.
“Then we come back and we’re all sick.”
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.
Killing on high school curricula
Canadian high school students can now earn credits (and cash) learning to shoot machine guns.
by Matthew Behrens
April 24, 2006
The federal government of Stephen Harper, along with school boards across the country, is sending teenagers a decidedly mixed message these days. On the one hand, kids are told to stay away from guns in their communities, a warning that’s backed by a law-and-order agenda of prison, prison, and more prison for any kid who screws up.
However, if you DO like guns and want to learn how to kill people in>communities half a world away, you can actually earn not only high school credits, you can also get paid for it. Increasingly, through the auspices of high school co-op placement programs, 16-year-olds can sign up with the Canadian Armed Forces, an outfit whose big boss, General Rick Hillier, makes no bones about goals and benchmarks: “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”
The Army Reserve Co-op program at one high school pays students $1,400 for two weeks in the field, learning how to fire automatic weapons.
Bored with school in, say, Southern Ontario’s Cayuga Secondary School? Check out the Cooperative Education program, where students can snore through the co-op with Ontario Hydro and learn about some old guy named Adam Beck, or they can live out the fantasies portrayed to them through the fast-action Canadian Forces war propaganda ads they now see on TV and film screens by signing up with “Army Co-op.”
”Army training will teach you basic skills – marching, and saluting; rank structure; military law; how to wear your uniform and conduct yourself; and first aid,” the website for the school program states. “You will then progress to field training. You will learn how to safely operate and maintain your C-7 service rifle, and the C-9 light machine gun. You will fire all these weapons with blank (practice) and live ammunition. You will also learn how to live for extended periods in the field. During the course, you will spend about two weeks on the ranges and in the field, for which you are paid about $1,400.”
Shooting machine guns? Handling grenades? And getting paid for it? How awesome can that sound when you’re a teenager???? Check out any co-op program in high schools across the country and you are likely to find an existing or prospective placement program with the Canadian Armed Forces. The Toronto District School Board, Canada’s largest, has a program with the Canadian military, and it is quite likely wherever you are, a similar program exists.
At a time when the issue of school violence continues to grab headlines, why are schools reaching out to and embracing the very institution which, more than any other, represents the use of violence and killing as a means of conflict resolution? And at a time when Canada’s armed forces are desperate to sign up young people, why are school boards offering up tender 16-year-olds as fresh bait for indoctrination in the ways of war?
The program has drawn some controversy in Windsor, Ontario, where a group called Women in Black has spoken out against it. “We don’t look at this program as an opportunity – we look at it as a death sentence,” spokesperson Marilyn Eves told the Windsor Star April 15. Eves, a retired teacher, asked, “What is the future for these kids? They’re going overseas to fight and some of them are going to die.” She told the paper that students are likely to be seduced away from non-paying cooperative placements by the promise of pay, medical and dental coverage, and four credits toward their diplomas. “It’s a huge enticement. It’s an obvious bribe.”
Grade 10 students in Collingwood recently received a visit from a soldier who went through the military co-op program, calling it one of the best things that ever happened to her. The cutline beneath a picture of the soldier read: “Master Corporal Brienna Ross-Hood recently spoke to the Grade 10 class at Collingwood Collegiate Institute attempting to recruit the youth into the army reserve co-op program.” ”She belongs to the infantry, which is the core of the army and referred to as fighting soldiers,” the story stated. “’We’re sort of the weapons specialists in the military,’ she said. ‘I absolutely love taking all the weapons apart and cleaning them.’” The article noted: “Students who chose to take the co-op program are guaranteed full-time summer employment following completion, and a part-time job while either finishing high school or post-secondary.”
Financial support to militarize young children has always been a priority for federal governments of all stripes. Indeed, the largest federally funded national youth training program for 12-18 year-olds has traditionally been military cadets, funding for which has topped over $1 billion in the past decade. While there are 350,000 Scouts and Guides compared with 56,000 cadets, the former receive nearly no public subsidy. The cost of summer training for five cadets could equal Canada’s entire annual subsidy to Guides.
And the push is on to enlarge this priority of militarizing children. ”I believe that military service is the highest calling of citizenship,” Prime Minister Harper told a group of young soldiers April 13 at a military graduation in Wainwright, Alberta. (But Harper doesn’t plan on reaching that high calling for himself; rather, he stays home while he sends young people overseas to kill and be killed on his behalf).
That same day, CTV reported on a triumphant War Minister Gordon O’Connor who declared a “recent advertising blitz by the military seems to have worked….Ads shown on movie theatre and television screens helped bring in 5,800 applications to Canada’ Armed Forces in the last fiscal year – 300 more than the goal of 5,500.” ”This morning I got a report from National Defence [sic] headquarters that for this year’s target, we’re at 110 per cent,” said O’Connor, who now wants to find and train 23,000 new recruits.
Some of those recruits will likely be coming out of the same place that increasingly is called upon to provide a curriculum of tolerance, respect, and nonviolent conflict resolution. If you do not want your local high school pairing up with an institution whose top general publicly declares he’s all pumped up to go after an “enemy” he describes as “detestable scumbags,” let your guidance departments know, call your school boards, and put an end to this dangerous trend.
Of course, there will be those who say that doing this dishonours veterans, to which you can simply reply, “Balderdash.” Canada’s War Dept. is eager to send young women and men overseas, but does little or nothing to help them when they return physically or emotionally damaged from warfare. They have yet to recognize and compensate those suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, from Agent Orange testing in New Brunswick; veterans from as far back as World War II continue fighting the government for long overdue benefits.
The best way to honour veterans who know the horror of war is to say: make war no more. It’s time to close up the War Department with one exception: we need to keep a department for providing proper compensation to the veterans and families who have made huge sacrifices while the Harpers of this world have stayed home, basking in someone else’s sacrifices.
The stories from teh front lines continue to get worse and worse… so the government sends more and more people off to experience those horrors. Rather vicious cycle, isn’t it?