02/09/10 – Cole Miller – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
All right, so now to our next guest.
It's Cole Miller from NoMoreVictims.org.
Welcome to the show, Cole.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, thanks.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Well, this is a hell of a project you have going here.
I had no idea about this.
Did I understand your kind of embedded video there on the front page correctly, that you've been doing this since 1999, this project?
No, no.
I've been doing it since 2002.
Oh, since 2002, I guess.
In anticipation of the war.
I see.
Well, okay, first of all, let's go ahead and let you explain what it is this project is, and I think I can just add as an aside here, I think you talk about someone who was injured in an airstrike in 1999, and that's where I got that from.
But go ahead and tell us all about NoMoreVictims, please.
Well, it started off when I was looking about for something to do, given the fact that Iraq, this beleaguered, non-threatening population was about to be assaulted by the United States, and I decided to make a poster using a photograph of a child who had been injured by U.S. forces.
And I got in touch, actually, with somebody from Austin who you may know, Alan Poe.
Oh, no, I don't know him.
You don't know him?
Well, he's a great documentary photographer, and he's a member of Veterans for Peace, he's a Vietnam combat vet, and he was over with the Veterans for Peace delegation in Basra in 2000 to restore a water treatment plant.
And while he was there, he snapped a couple of photographs of a girl named Isra Misyat, and she had lost her arm in a U.S. airstrike that took place on January 25, 1999, in the so-called no-fly zone.
And I just made a poster using that photograph, put it up on the web, and had thousands and thousands of downloads.
So I put it up in nine languages, and then I had tens of thousands of downloads from all over the world.
And I thought, well, there's really something here.
And so then we put some money together.
Alan went back to Iraq over Christmas of 2002 and actually found her, living in a little tiny village called Abu Fluth.
So within three months of making the poster, I saw a photograph of the child with the poster in her hand.
And I thought, this is a small world.
We can actually intervene and assist some of the victims of aggression.
And so that's what I began to try to do.
I started to collect medical reports.
I knew that communities around the country would see news reports about the children who were getting treatment, and they would contact me wanting to duplicate that process, and that happened.
And so now we've done 12 evacuations.
We brought 10 different children to the United States for medical care.
They've been treated in communities all over the country, and that has generated a kind of awareness that I don't think you can get through other means, at least none that I've hit upon yet.
Now, how many children have you been able to help so far?
Well, I mean, with the evacuations to the United States for medical care, there have been 10 kids.
All of them were hurt, some of them very severely, by U.S. forces and U.S. military operations in Iran.
We've also provided assistance, some surgeries in Jordan, and then some assistance in-country for children whose injuries are beyond any kind of medical remedy but have needs that aren't being met, kids who need wheelchairs, kids who are paralyzed and need medical mattresses to reduce the incidence of bed sores, food generators, heaters, stuff like that.
Why don't you go through and tell us about some of these kids?
I watched the video this morning that you have on the site there, really powerful stuff.
Well, the first little boy that we brought was a boy by the name of Mustafa Salah.
On January 25, 1999, the mother had given him a few dinar, and they were going off to get some sweets.
And there was a U.S. airstrike, and his brother was killed.
He was 6 years old.
And Mustafa was riddled with shrapnel and lost part of his hand and part of his liver.
When he came to the United States, he had 130 pieces of shrapnel in his body, so that micro shrapnel, but he was literally peppered all over his body.
And obviously, he's going to have to live with the consequences of that for the rest of his life.
Israel lost her arm, and she was fitted with a prosthetic there in Houston, Texas.
And Alan Pogue put much of that project together.
Now, there was a little girl named Alakhalid Hamdan, and she was 3 years old when it was on May the 3rd of 2005.
And a U.S. tank round hit the family's home while the men were off at work.
And her two brothers were killed.
Her three cousins were killed, all children under the age of 10.
Her aunt lost both of her legs, and her mother was blinded in one eye.
And Ala was left with 11 pieces of micro shrapnel in one eye and 17 pieces of micro shrapnel in the other eye, and had two detached retinas.
So she was blind when she got to the United States.
And a highly skilled retinal surgeon in Florida extracted the micro shrapnel, reattached the retinas, and now that child who would otherwise have been blind is learning how to read.
Now, that happened because a 22-year-old law student by the name of Ashley Severins saw a news report about no more victims, said she wanted to become involved because she had two kids of her own, and she wanted to help one of these kids.
And she put together the medical piece of that.
Now, the doctor said that the child was within a couple of weeks of permanently losing her eyesight because the micro shrapnel was continuing to do nerve damage.
So that was one of the children.
Let me stop you there for just a minute, because if I remember what I saw in this video this morning, by the end of this video she doesn't even have to wear glasses anymore.
Her eyesight was completely saved in both eyes.
Is that it, or in one?
No, they managed to save the eyesight in one eye, and she will have to wear very thick glasses for the rest of her life.
I mean, the damage is permanent, but at least she can see.
Yeah, and at least it's not getting worse, like you said.
She's going to lose it.
And now tell us again about the young lady who helped, who saw this on the news and decided she wanted to get involved and put the medical team together, because I think something that I very rarely know the answer to, but I get asked it all the time, and I guess I ask it all the time, is, yeah, but what can we do about it?
And it looks to me like nomorevictims.org is a way for anybody who is really against this policy to actually do something, and at least they can feel that they've accomplished something.
If none of us were able to stop the invasion of Iraq, at least we can try to do like you and help ameliorate the consequences of it for the most innocent victims of it.
Some, huh?
Sure.
Well, Ashley Severance was then a 22-year-old law student.
She's now a lawyer.
And she had two kids of her own, and obviously little money and little free time, but she just dedicated herself to helping this child, and she managed to do it.
Once she had connected the child with care, pro bono care, I then implemented all the processes to get the child to the United States so that she could get access to that treatment.
And I see this in really pretty simple terms.
You live in Los Angeles now, right?
Right.
Yeah, and I live in Los Angeles.
And if you were over at my apartment and we heard a woman screaming across the street because she was being brutalized and raped, we would both feel an instantaneous impulse to intervene and help her.
And the way I see this is that we have entire countries being raped, entire civilizations being raped.
And what I want to do is, you know, awaken that impulse and then develop methods that permit its constructive expression.
And this is what we came up with.
Every child that comes to the United States brings a story with them, and those are the stories that we're not getting in the mainstream media.
And I don't know how much time you're able to spend on the side, but we've actually gotten a lot of coverage for these children and their stories.
And the parents get to say, this is what I came home and this is what I found.
I mean, one particularly horrific example of it is Mustafa Abed.
And on November 2nd of 2004, you remember we were gearing up for elections, those farcical events that we had every four years.
And this little kid, you know, he was 1 year and 11 months old.
His mother had taken him to a clinic to get a shot because he had an infection.
And when she was walking home, the United States started to do some softening up bombing.
They got caught up in it.
And he had about a quarter of his body blown off.
He lost his leg.
He lost half of his pelvis.
He lost his hip.
And he also developed kidney stones.
And when we got him to the United States, he had a bladder stone the size of a pine cone.
And it was forcing urine back up into the kidneys.
And, you know, anyone who's had a kidney stone knows how painful they are.
I mean, they'll put a linebacker on his back screaming.
Now, this kid has had to deal with that from the time he was injured in 2004 until the time we got him here last year.
So the father was actually at prayer.
They heard the bombing.
He ran over.
The last thing he expected to see was his own son lying on the ground with his leg connected to his body by a little string of flesh.
That's what he discovered.
Now, this boy, we got him to the States, and he was on the verge of complete, full-on renal failure.
One of his kidneys failed.
It had to be removed.
The other one was saved, but it's not fully functional.
And so he's going to have to take precautions for the rest of his life to ensure that the surviving kidney is not exposed to additional insults.
Otherwise, he'll have renal failure, and it's unlikely he'll be able to obtain dialysis, so kill him.
Now, the doctors estimate that he had less than 5% chance of survival when this occurred, and against all odds, he managed to survive.
But he'll wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.
He has to be catheterized every four hours.
And so these events that occurred, a single bombing causes such horrific human misery in many instances.
We really need to pay attention to it.
This is another boy, Mustafa Ghazwan.
He was just treated this past year, last year, in San Francisco.
A U.S. missile hit the home next to his home.
He was standing next to the wall.
It completely blew out his hearing.
It got 130 decibels.
He could not hear anything.
And we brought him to the States.
He was fitted with a cochlear implant, and he's now learning how to speak and interpret speech.
But there's a story around that story, which is that there was an old man who was kind of a favorite in the neighborhood who lived in that home next door.
They never found a trace of him.
He was vaporized.
There were two children out on the street who were buying sweets.
They were both killed.
So it was the man who was selling the children the sweets.
Across the street, there was a woman who had been childless all of her life.
And she and her husband had saved a lot of money to get very expensive fertility treatment, and she had finally conceived.
But when this blast occurred, it knocked her down, and she miscarried.
And when she miscarried, she went mad.
Now she wanders around the house holding onto a doll that she pretends is her child.
If Americans had just a glimpse, if the mainstream media would cover one of these stories in detail, I think that the American people would be responsive.
You know, we're not a bunch of bloody butchers.
But the rest of the world is beginning to see us in that light.
And I think the only thing that stands between them becoming convinced that we really are that way is this kind of effective solidarity where we reach out and try to make amends and oppose what's being done.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think it's just like you say about if you hear a woman scream outside, you run and go help.
It sounds kind of patronizing and insulting or whatever, but I think it really is almost as simple as you can't hear them scream from here.
In North America and Iraq, I have just too many miles between, and we can't smell the burning bodies.
We don't hear the screams of women who have lost their children.
And, you know, frankly, I mean, let's be honest here, Cole.
You're an American male.
You're a human male just like me.
And that means you like explosions.
They're neato.
And that's why if you want to make millions of dollars on a movie, you put lots of explosions in it and stuff.
You know, explosions are cool.
And airplanes going Mach 2 and all these things.
You can watch Discovery Channel all day, and they'll tell you all about the hardware of war and never tell you about the people on the ground.
And it becomes, you know, that lady across the street, well, she's one of us.
She's the neighbor, you know.
But people over there, they're almost not even people.
They're like cartoon characters, you know.
All people know about Iraq is the movie Aladdin or something.
They can't even imagine.
They can maybe imagine a vague shape of what Iraq is sort of shaped like on a map, but they can't imagine it as a real place with real people, with real mothers on their knees, screaming for God to strike them down, too, because they can't take the grief.
And yet that is, in fact, how it is.
That's what these bombs really do to people.
Yeah, well, I absolutely agree that it's true, and we ought to be getting that side of the story.
We're not getting that side of the story.
So people really can't respond if they don't know what's happening.
This war is not being covered in its human aspect.
Well, you know, when I say all that stuff, I'm just describing myself from earlier days, right?
When I was in ninth grade, I didn't care about bombing Iraq other than explosions look cool.
And I remember my own mindset as a ninth grader, and I think that's a pretty accurate depiction of most Americans' mindset, which is whatever happens to the Iraqi people doesn't matter at all.
You have to really stop and think and decide.
No, they're individuals, and boy, you know, this little kid would have his face blown off.
That must really hurt him on a daily basis a lot.
You have to stop and really consider.
Otherwise, you could live in this society and just go right on pretending.
No, that's absolutely true.
You could, and if you see what we see on the tube, you see a kind of foreign-looking landscape.
It's a desert landscape.
You see people dressed differently than we are, slightly different skin tone than we have, and speaking a language that we don't understand, and suddenly it's Pluto.
Well, it's not Pluto.
It's a plane right away.
And one of the things that's happening, a lot of the technologies that I'm using, the Internet, cameras, other technologies, e-mail, etc., etc., all of those were developed by the so-called Department of Defense with public money.
And then as soon as they can make a profit, obviously it's spun out to the private sector.
But I'm utilizing the very same technologies to get closer to the people who are being harmed, and we can all do that.
I mean, the globe is becoming wired.
We can find out what's happening.
We can communicate with people on the ground.
I mean, just today I got an e-mail from somebody in a human rights group that I'm working with in Afghanistan, and they're off investigating a strike that occurred pretty recently that killed a whole bunch of people, including 10 students.
Now, are there kids who were injured, whose injuries could be treated, either in the United States or elsewhere, with the assistance of community groups who are doing it as a matter of conscience, out of a sense of responsibility?
Wait a minute.
You're talking about...
That is probably.
Cole, are you talking about the story from a few weeks ago where the soldiers supposedly took the kids out and executed them?
I'm not sure it's that one, and I just got a preliminary e-mail from him, so I'm not sure whether it's that or something else.
I'd like to follow up on that with you later on.
I would love to.
There's another little boy that we're trying to help.
We already have his medical report.
He's from Afghanistan.
He lost seven members of his family, seven members of his family, in a strike that killed over 100 civilians in Farah province.
Now, what happened to him is there was a little girl named Nora who was shot in the head by an American sniper as she was pulling up to her house with her father in the car.
The bullet caught her behind the ear, and then it came out at the top of her head and shattered a big chunk of her skull.
What's amazing is that she remained herself, her personality, no cognitive deficits that anybody could find.
She was in a coma for a couple of weeks, but her brain was left unprotected because the skull bone was gone.
So we brought her here, and she had a custom implant inserted, so now she can go outside and play.
Her brain is protected.
This boy in Farah, he has a similar but milder injury where a little piece of his skull is missing, and it's soft.
Most kinds of head injuries.
The other thing that people can do is the doctors in the United States, the medical groups in the United States, are very willing to help.
So I send medical reports to the University of San Francisco Medical Center to a doctor named Dan Lowenstein who has been extremely helpful with the treatment set up for Mustafa, the boy who lost his hearing.
He has access to a wide range of specialists who are some of the top people in their field, and they take a look at the medical reports, and they tell us if there are other tests that need to be done.
They give kind of a preliminary idea of what the child needs.
If we do that, just think of the national security aspect of that.
To the extent that national security actually involves the physical integrity of actual citizens, I don't think there's anything that we could do to enhance our national security more than showing that we give a damn about what's happening to these people and that we're ready to make an effort to try to ameliorate the harm and provide some restorative justice.
And I don't know why the line has not really come up.
I think people should be arguing that the brutality, the callousness, and the irresponsibility of successive American administrations are endangering American families, because that's what's actually happening.
Well, you know, there's actually a story from not very long ago about old-school al-Qaeda from even before September 11th, I think.
I forgot which guy it was, but he said that when he saw the protests in Britain and America on the eve of the Iraq war, he went, Huh?
Millions of white Christians in the streets saying no?
Oh.
Well, that's kind of different than the way they told me it was, huh?
And that's really what kind of made him rethink his willingness to participate in that kind of thing.
But now here's a hard question, and I don't mean to be cheeky or whatever about it, but I think it really does matter, and I wonder whether you've considered this and what you think of this.
My friend Bill Kelsey flies relief missions.
Oh, by the way, he's a friend of Alan Pogue, too.
Oh, okay, there you go.
I met him through Alan Pogue.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, and Bill says, Hey, listen, I understand that when I'm flying, you know, food aid and medical aid and doctors and equipment and things to help victims into a war zone like Afghanistan, I know that I'm kind of helping the war.
In a way, I'm part of the Pentagon's plan.
When the Pentagon says, Okay, we're going to kill these people here and these people there, they know that good people are going to be trying to clean up their mess behind them, and then they can rely on that to a certain extent.
There are so many people who are willing to go and be, say, for example, civilians helping in Afghanistan or who are willing to bring injured children to the United States.
In a sense, maybe, you know, you say you're good PR for our national security.
Maybe you're good PR for the Pentagon.
Maybe you make it easier for the empire to do what it does, do you think?
Well, that's not the primary objective.
Well, certainly not.
The primary objective is to help someone who has been hurt.
And the national security argument is just a straightforward, very, you know, commonsensical recognition of reality.
When we drop bombs on people's children, they get angry.
And I think that it boils down to, at the end of the day, so long as the powerful reject the restraint of law, they're going to sow the seeds of terrorism.
I think that that's kind of a given.
But to get to Kelsey's point, you know, I agree with him, and I've had experience with that.
Non-government organizations and others can be used.
But we don't take money from the government.
And if you look at the website, we are very, very straightforward in our opposition to the war.
We're very straightforward about what should be done to the people who committed this.
You know, this is straightforward on aggression.
In other words, supreme crime under international law, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
We are responsible.
And it's an expression not only of, you know, compassion and concern for the people who have been victimized, but it's also a clamor for justice for the people who perpetrated the crime.
And I don't know that, you know, when Kelsey flies one of these missions, I don't know where the funding comes from.
I don't know whether he's permitted to express himself in that way.
I have no idea.
But that's what we're doing.
And, of course, I agree with you, and, of course, Bill does too, and he continues to do it because, I mean, after all, I'm an individualist, and here you are helping an individual.
In fact, in these cases, all the people that you're helping here are children who, by definition, absolutely could not possibly have deserved it, no matter what kind of spin you could put on it.
They're all innocent victims, and they all deserve help, and you've done a great job.
I mean, this is heroic work just watching this 15-minute video on your website, which I urge everyone to go and look at.
It's at nomorevictims.org.
This is really heroic work that you've done here, and you really deserve a lot of credit for it.
So now, in the last couple of minutes here, please tell the audience, because I know they're dying to know, get your pens out, everybody, how can they help you at nomorevictims.org?
Well, here's what we're doing.
We're moving into kind of the third phase of this.
We've brought a bunch of children, and we have created a method for effectively evacuating a child and providing medical assistance to the child.
And there's a group called, and I'd urge people to visit that site, it's called healingchildrenofconflict.org.
Healingchildrenofconflict.org.
Now, that's a group in Michigan that is basically going to duplicate, with some modification, the No More Victims model, and they're actually going to work to help kids in Gaza, kids in Iraq, and kids in perhaps they haven't fully discussed this, but kids in Afghanistan, and I'm hoping that they will do that.
And they'll be doing it independently, raising their own funds.
I will be helping by consulting, and I'll provide all the assistance I can in terms of contacts and everything.
If I'm not in the least interested in growing a big top-down organization, I want people at the grassroots to see that it's possible for them to do this and then just to decide to do it.
And they can do it in their way with my assistance, and I'll help as much as I can.
My website is www.nomorevictims.org.
They can go there, they can see the video.
In addition to the video that you saw, there's a bunch of other video there, and I have about 100 hours of video that I've shot with the family, and we're working on putting together a documentary that will...
One piece that I have not seen in documentaries is this particular piece, where community groups are actually organizing to provide assistance to injured children as an expression of opposition to war.
I haven't seen that element really in any documentary, so we're working to put together a documentary.
Obviously, we got hit really hard by the Wall Street implosion, all these bankers running off with their filthy lucre, which hurt people all over the country, and that's obviously had an impact on No More Victims.
If anybody can part with a dime or two here or there, that would be hugely helpful to us.
And then we're going to be posting, as more medical reports come in, we're going to be posting them, and then we'll be actively seeking out people in communities around the country who want to put together projects of their own, and then we'll facilitate those.
So I just hope that people will just recognize that this is an option.
There's so much important work going on, and I can't tell you how many times I've been in the Middle East listening to you on the radio, and earlier on it was you and Charles Goyer.
And to hear that going on, that's a huge encouragement to someone like me out there just trying to make this happen.
People really think that they are more limited than they are.
There's a lot that we can do, and that sensation of powerlessness, if you think about it, we're by definition the most powerful political actors who've ever lived.
We live in far and away the most powerful military empire that the planet has ever produced.
We are relatively free, and that by definition gives us a great deal of influence, but people seem to accept that there's nothing they can do.
I think it's a fallacy, and I think that the work of No More Victims, and it's not just me, it's Alan Pogue, it's Ashley Severance, it's Ann Miller.
I met the woman I married doing these projects.
A woman by the name of Ann Coffring got in touch with me.
She's from South Carolina, probably the reddest state in the country.
And she got in touch with me and said that she wanted to do something, and she eventually brought two kids, Sally Allowee and her sister Russel, for prosthetics treatment in South Carolina.
And we met as a result of that, and now we're married.
Great.
Well, I've got to tell you, you really do set a great example, and people are so frustrated, and it really is the question on the tip of everybody's tongue.
I get it all day long, and that is, what can we do about it?
And I say, follow Cole Miller.
Go to nomorevictims.org.
There's an example for you guys to emulate, y'all.
Well, this is a juggernaut going down.
I don't know, if we need to close, that's fine, but I grew up in Wyoming.
I dropped out of the high school that Dick Cheney graduated from, which looks wonderful on a resume.
And I loved to ski.
It was my favorite sport.
And there's not much to do when you're riding up the chairlift, but there was always that guy who was in a little over his head, who was on a slope that was a little too steep and a little too bumpy.
And he'd start off down the hill, gradually gaining momentum, and there was this magic moment that you could always discern when he crossed the speed rubicon, and the only way he was going to stop was by falling.
And the longer he held on in desperation, the harder he would fall.
And it's as if this American empire has reached that stage.
I mean, we're broke, we're bankrupt, yet we're escalating wars, expanding wars, and it's kind of astonishing to watch.
Well, I really do have to wrap it up here.
We've got to move on to our next guest, but this is really heroic work that you're doing here, Cole, and I really appreciate your time on the show.
I hope we can do it again soon.
Me too.
Great speaking with you.
All right, everybody, that's Cole Miller from nomorevictims.org.
Go and check it out.
We'll be right back after this.