03/17/10 – 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.
Welcome back to the show.
Our guest today is Cole Miller from NoMoreVictims.org.
Welcome back to the show, Cole.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Good to be with you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us.
All right, so for those not familiar, what is NoMoreVictims.org?
Well, NoMoreVictims.org is an organization that identifies children who have been injured by U.S. forces in Iraq and now Afghanistan and then finds medical sponsorships in communities in the United States and brings them over for medical treatment.
And then, of course, there's media folded into that.
I mean, with the child comes the story of what happened to the child.
And that gets coverage in local and some national media.
So it shows Americans, at least in one individual case, what happens when we use these weapons in civilian areas in order to carry out whatever our aims seem to be.
Well, now, I think that's an important point that this isn't one of those charities that you see on the infomercial in the middle of the night where they go, oh, yeah, you sent us all your money, and as far as you know, something great will happen or something, or some kind of vaguely half-trustworthy pseudo-missionary something or other here.
You have a, I guess, relatively speaking, this is a very small handful of specific young children that you have dedicated to helping, and in very significant ways, right?
This isn't a dollar a day for Sally Struthers or whatever.
This is reconstructive surgery for children who've lost their faces and limbs, eyeballs.
This is life-saving or at least extremely life-changing medical attention that you are bringing to these very specific individual lives here.
Well, that part of it is handled more by the communities because the way it works, I have what I do, which I identify the children, and then I make the medical reports available to the community that wants to provide assistance.
And then they go out, and they are the ones who know the hospital administrators and the doctors and others in the community, and they make arrangements for pro bono care.
So the medical care is provided pro bono.
We have had to pay some fees in some instances, but for the most part, it's been pro bono because you know how expensive medical care is in the United States.
But in addition to that, we then have to evacuate the child from the home country, support them during the visa process, get them to the United States, support them during the treatment period, support the family back home, because usually it's the father who accompanies the child, and whatever income stream there is is lost to the family, so we provide that kind of support as well.
So, yes, it's intensive support for a period of time through a treatment period, and we have managed, and we're very grateful that we've had such favorable treatment outcomes.
One child I spoke about before was blind when she arrived, and now she's learning how to read.
She had two detached retinas, and she had microshrapnel in both eyes.
And once a very skilled retinal surgeon reattached the retinas and cleaned out her eyes, she was able to see again.
Now, that child was in danger of losing her eyesight permanently.
In fact, the doctor said that within a period of about two weeks, he would not have been able to do what he did for her.
There's another little boy who basically one side of his face was crushed.
He had a crushed temporal mandibular joint.
He lost one of his eyes.
He had severe burning on one side of his face, and he refused to go to school because he was taunted by children.
Kids are kids.
And after he came here for treatment, that all went away.
He now has a prosthetic eye that mimics his other eye.
We have great doctors here in the United States.
And they fixed his crushed temporal mandibular joint, so now food doesn't come out of his mouth when he chews.
And he's back in school, and he's the top student in his class.
That's Abdul Hakim.
So there have been wonderful stories that have come out of this.
Another little boy I spoke about before, Mustafa, is still pain-free, and I just got an update on him that he's doing fine.
And he's the poor kid who lost basically a quarter of his body when he was 11 months old.
And from that time until he came to the United States for treatment, he had extremely intense periodic pain because he developed kidney stones as a result of the injury.
And he's been pain-free since.
So, yes, there are very large benefits that each of the kids enjoys.
And one of the great things about this project here, we've all been working, again, everyone who's interested has been working to stop this war for a long time.
And a lot of people get very discouraged because they see that the policy does not reflect their wishes or the wishes of the American people, and then a lot of people throw up their hands and say nothing can be done.
Well, when you work to help one individual child and you have that as a focus, you get the gratification of seeing your efforts lead to a great result for that child.
You see that child get better.
So it helps to sustain interest and commitment.
And in the long term, as more and more communities get involved in it and as more news coverage results, it has a kind of broader, longer-term educational effect, at least theoretically and potentially.
Sure.
And that's what we're working toward.
It's hard for people to respond if they don't know what's happening, and unless they listen to antiwar.com and unless they have the time to spend that it requires to research stuff that should be covered by the mainstream media, they're just not going to learn about what's going on.
So they have nothing to respond to.
Well, or even if they see some things on the news, at least occasionally, that make them mad, usually, you know, I think we all kind of learn young.
Don't stress yourself out worrying about things that you cannot control.
Leave the things that you cannot control to somebody else to worry about.
You worry about the things you've got to take care of.
It's hard enough just to run your own life and things like that.
And so I think a lot of people decide to not even really care about politics or what's going on in the world beyond their own life at all based on that kind of premise.
But what you're proving here is that you really can do something about it.
And, man, I mean, in the cases, just looking at the pictures of these kids on your website, hey, here's some people who really deserve to be helped, and here's something where anybody can actually do something to help them in a way that, you know, if it can't be quantified with mathematics or measurements or something, you know, it's a hell of a lot of love to be felt anyway, you know?
Yeah, that's true.
And I basically saw this project developing in essentially three phases.
First, we would put together a couple of demonstration projects that would, you know, show that it could be done.
And then I thought that other communities would see news reports about it and that they would contact us wanting to do the same thing.
And that happened, and we brought, you know, ten children over, and two of them have been twice for follow-up care.
And then the third phase is when we would help facilitate groups that independently applied the model, that they adapted it as they wanted to.
They administered and raised their own funds, created their own web presence, and then they put together projects.
And we're really, you know, close on a project in Michigan.
I now agree to take on this boy, Syed, who suffered a severe head injury in the May 3rd attack in Farah Province.
And if you recall, that's an attack in which the villagers said 147 civilians were killed.
The Karzai government said 147 civilians were killed.
The U.S. government disputed that, tried to turn it into old news, then admitted there had been some civilians killed, but disputed the numbers.
Human Rights Watch says over 100 civilians were killed.
So now within, you know, that boy's story and his injury comes out of a whole factual background.
So each of those people who were killed has a name.
They had a life.
They had hopes and dreams and fears.
They were like you and me.
They're all dead now.
That's part of the story that the boy brings with him when he comes to the United States.
And I, you know, now I'm hoping that people will just see how dire it is.
I mean, these wars are escalating.
I mean, there's so many dangerous things going on right now.
You know, we've moved all of these bunker-busting bombs to Diego Garcia, at least we read news reports of that, in preparation for an attack on Iran.
I mean, how far are these people prepared to go with this?
It is only going to take a roused public saying, what the hell are you doing?
You're endangering my family and bankrupting my country.
That's going to put a stop to it because, you know, it's wired, it's nonpartisan.
I mean, we really, our foreign policy is a bipartisan scandal, always has been.
So I'm just hoping that people will really see how it's going to affect them.
Unfortunately, it seems that people here, as a general matter, only respond when their own interests are directly affected.
And, you know, I mean, there's evidence of it everywhere.
I mean, we have an imploding economy.
We have shyster bankers who are stealing everything.
We have, what, a trillion?
What is our defense, so-called defense budget a year now?
Yeah, approximately a trillion a year.
Is it close to a trillion dollars when you include everything?
Yeah, yeah, it's actually probably more than a trillion now with all of Obama's increases.
Yeah, well, that has a direct effect not only on people who are alive today, but it's going to have an effect on future generations.
And by the way, for the audience, I should say, Cole, that's not the official number.
That's when you count the wars, which are never included in the official defense budget.
They're separate, off books.
So you've got to include the wars, and then you've got to include all the intelligence agency money, you know, another $100 billion or so, plus all the maintenance and feeding of the nuclear weapons under the Department of Energy.
And, you know, it goes on like that.
But it's basically, and, of course, the worldwide network of as many as 1,000 military bases.
That's about a trillion dollars a year when you total it all up.
Yeah, and think of the damage that that's doing here and the damage it's doing to future generations.
And they're basically spending people's grandchildren's money to do something that doesn't make any sense anyway.
I mean, they're not going to succeed.
They're not going to succeed in Afghanistan.
I mean, it's a losing proposition, obviously.
And one has to begin to wonder, you know, whether or not all these neocons are al-Qaeda plants.
I mean, we're carrying out what would have been the fondest wishes of somebody like Osama bin Laden, a religious fanatic, you know?
Sure.
I think they basically said, didn't they, very straightforwardly, you know, we're a small group, we can't accomplish much, but if we can drag the United States into unwinnable wars, we'll bleed them dry.
Well, and now here's the thing, though, because, I mean, you're right, but you're sort of admitting defeat and you're appealing to that most base self-interest of the American people because they don't care about anybody else.
These little kids, for example, that I'm looking at on your website right now, nomorevictims.org, if there's a way to beat the American people in the head, to get them to open their eyes and recognize the fact that if somebody lives in another country, they're still people, that saltwater doesn't take people's humanity from them if they just happen to live on the other side of some of it from here or something like that.
And we've got this whole society, it's this weird sort of, it's almost a racism, I guess it's just nationalism, it doesn't really matter what color or creed you are, but if you're an American, then you're an Uberman, and these other people can just all die.
And if an explosion goes off because an American military man dropped a bomb or shot one, then cool.
It looks cool, and it's killing bad guys, and it doesn't, the American people don't mind it at all.
And yet, I'm looking at pictures of little bitty toddlers who were the ones on the receiving ends of those shells.
And in fact, it's not okay to tear a little kid's life apart with high explosives.
I don't mean to say that the American people would be indifferent to that.
They are indifferent, as long as you're not showing them the picture of the kid himself, you know?
Well, you know, there's a story, the little girl, Ala Khalid, I spoke about her eyes and how sight was restored here.
That work was done in Orlando, Florida, and there was an Iraqi American businessman who had in his employee, a guy who was in his 50s, and they had had arguments or just conversations about the war right along.
And the guy had already said, well, you know, now that basically the die is cast, I have to support my president, I have to support the troops, and left it at that.
Well, one day, Ala and her father went to visit this guy.
And so he brought that employee in, introduced her, and showed her the wounds, because the little girl was peppered with shrapnel all over her body.
And a piece of shrapnel ripped her stomach open, and she was, at the time she was there, herniated.
So her intestines were pressing against skin.
You can see it all very clearly, a massive scar on her abdomen.
And he looked at it, and then he just turned around and walked out of the room.
Then Ala and her father visited for a while and then left, and this guy was getting ready to close up shop, and he heard a sound coming from a back office.
And he went in there, and the guy was sitting at a desk and sobbing.
And he said, I don't care what they say.
Nothing makes what we did to that girl okay.
But it does have that effect, especially how you should see in these communities when people are face-to-face with little kids that are just like their own, who have missing limbs or are blind, and their response, suddenly it's brought down to a human level that they can understand.
You can't understand 100,000.
You can't understand a million people dead.
But you can understand one little child struggling to overcome a disability that we inflicted on her.
Yeah, well, you know, I think we may have discussed this before when you were on the show the first time, that I get ranting and raving like this, and I think it's pretty obvious that I'm only yelling at old me from when I was a little kid, I guess ninth grade, the first Gulf War.
I didn't care about Iraqis dying when I was in ninth grade.
Explosions are cool, and I'm a red-blooded American male, and I like watching explosions on TV, and what do I care about a bunch of Iraqis?
And that's who I'm yelling at now is what I used to think, which I know is what most Americans think.
What most Americans think is my mindset as a 15-year-old, you know, know nothing, know it all.
That's what most Americans think.
Explosions are cool, and fighting for our freedom, and a bunch of nonsense, instead of realizing that, no, actually, Iraqis are just as human as us, and perhaps even more, since we've apparently shed what's left of our humanity in this society.
Well, I didn't engage in this kind of work until I was way into my 40s.
So, yeah, I've been as guilty as anyone else of just not paying attention to what was going on, and not getting involved at times when the government was doing perfectly atrocious things all over the world.
Well, tell me some more stories.
Everybody, it's Cole Miller from nomorevictims.org.
Well, there's a story of a little girl named Nora, and there was a great piece of coverage on New England Cable News, which you can get to through the website.
They did a long-form story, it's about 11 minutes long, about her visit to Portland, Maine, for treatment.
And she was, you know, their family was coming home, she was with her father, they're driving in the family car.
They turn a corner on the block they live on, heading toward their house, and while they were away, Americans had put a sniper's nest up on the home next door.
And for reasons unknown, still unknown, probably never known, they opened fire on the car, and they hit her in the head.
And the bullet entered behind her ear and then came out the top of her skull and blew a big chunk of skull to pieces.
And so what was astonishing was, despite that very severe head injury that one would have imagined would have just killed her outright, she not only survived, but she didn't lose a lot of cognitive function, and her personality did not change.
She was in a coma for a couple of weeks, and when she came out, she was Nora.
But she was left with this large piece of skull bone missing, so a large section of her brain was unprotected.
So for two years after this occurred, her parents kept her in bed with them out of fear that she would get up in the night and fall and do permanent brain damage.
They didn't let her go out and play in the streets.
Well, she came here, and it was a very difficult operation.
It had to be done twice the first time it failed.
And she was here for a year.
And now she's back home, and she's going to school, and her brain is protected.
Now, there's no reason why communities all over the United States can't provide these kinds of services to some kids.
The kid gets help that the kid desperately needs.
The community gets a bit of education about what it means when you attack another country.
And that can be done.
And I'm hoping that this group, you know, it's called Healing Children of Conflict, and they have a website, HealingChildrenofConflict.org, that once that gets into full motion, they have a huge group of people.
They have six different organizations that are part of the coalition that are applying the model.
And I'm hoping that that will then radiate out from there to other communities around the country.
That's my hope.
Now, technology has made it possible for us to get very close to people.
There are nonviolent resistance movements within these countries.
There are human rights organizations in these countries that can assist Americans with, you know, finding out who these families are, finding out who the kids are.
And in some instances, you know, it does not make sense to bring the child to the United States for treatment.
Perhaps there's treatment that is available in the region, or perhaps the child just needs a wheelchair, physical therapy, other things that are available to the child that can be funded from here.
But I think the main thing is let's get to know these people.
Let's do the research to find out who they are and how we can best assist them, and then go to work to assist them, and then, very importantly, tell their story.
I mean, obviously, the Internet is a great tool for spreading awareness.
And the other ways that the model could be applied, you know, I thought it would be wonderful if people decided that, hey, look, they're giving a specific face and name to what's happening.
We know that all kinds of innocent people have been held for years, unlawfully detained for years.
They've been tortured.
They've been mistreated.
They've been denied the company of their families, et cetera.
Why doesn't this church group here take on this person, find out everything they can about him, and begin to advocate for him?
You know?
This guy has a name.
He has a face.
He has a family.
He's been held for all of these years illegally.
He did nothing.
We want to advocate for him.
Now, if you get one group doing that in Idaho, another group doing that in New Mexico, another group doing that in Florida, another group doing that in California, it begins to turn into something.
It's the powers that be, say, while people are paying attention.
Well, then you get back to that problem with American nationalism, where going to church means saluting the flag and supporting the troops, and if you take the side of innocent detainees or innocent child collateral damage victims or something, then you're taking the side of the terrorists and the bad guys against your own team.
Yeah, that's just one group, the church groups, but there are plenty of church members who are really concerned about what's happening.
And, you know, the Unitarians or the Quakers, there are Catholic churches that are very much opposed to what's going on.
And, you know, obviously you do have religious right-oriented churches, and those folks are not going to get involved, but there are plenty who will.
And you don't need to have everybody do it in order for it to become very effective.
And I just would like, you know, and look what that would say about us as a people.
Rather than just permitting our government to detain and torture these people, and if you think of Kilowar, you know, the taxicab driver, who was tortured to death after they knew he was completely innocent.
They continued abusing him.
Now, there are people who are now in the clutches of this terrible kind of gulag regime we've put together.
We know who they are.
We can advocate for them.
And I think that No More Victims is a kind of model that could be adapted for that use, if people wanted to do it.
Yeah.
All right.
So now, everybody, if you're just, you know, tuning in late here, catching the last part of this interview, it's Cole Miller from nomorevictims.org.
He basically organizes medical care, bringing victims of the American wars here from Iraq, Afghanistan, to get medical care, and arranges people.
There are different networks of people that get together to donate the medical care for free, and he's helped a lot of people.
And you were saying the other website for some people involved with this project is healingvictimsofconflict.org, right?
No, healingchildrenofconflict.org.
Oh, pardon me.
Yeah, healingchildrenofconflict.org.
Yeah, and one of the things that we're working on now is I've documented each of these projects with video, and we have just hundreds of hours of video, you know, interviews with the children and the parents, interviews with the doctors here.
In some instances, I film surgeries.
So we have a great deal of information here, and there's been a lot of media coverage, which will be folded into it as well, and we want to make a documentary, in fact, a series of documentaries, probably five or six one-hour documentaries.
And we want to explore, you know, obviously the spine of each individual piece will be the story of a child or a couple of children.
But then around that, we want to find out, well, what are the rules of engagement under which these children were hurt?
What were the munitions that were used?
I mean, people don't have much information about what spending, you know, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on infernal killing machines will get you.
You know, they specifically get at all of these brilliant scientists figuring out how to increase the lethality of these weapons.
And then the soldiers who have been sent over here, over there under false pretext.
There are soldiers out there who witnessed or participated in similar incidents, and there are probably soldiers out there who were involved in the incidents involving these particular children.
And I would love to hear from members of Iraq Veterans Against the War or from other veterans.
It would be great if they would go to the website, read some of the stories, and if they would like, I would love to come and interview them about those experiences for inclusion in a documentary.
So that would be great.
And obviously, we're looking for funding for the documentary.
So if people would like to help us, our website is www.
NoMoreVictims.org.
And I think that if we put this together in the right way, we can reach a lot of people with these stories.
Well, I sure hope so.
And, you know, sorry, I do have a pretty small audience.
But for what it's worth, I hope this helps spread the publicity and helps get at least a few more people to try to get involved in this project of yours.
It's of the utmost importance for so many different reasons.
So thank you very much, Cole.
I appreciate it.
Well, thank you, and thank you for having me on.
And keep going.
You're doing great stuff, Scott.
Well, I sure appreciate that.
All right, y'all, that is Cole Miller.
Somebody in the comments section on the Antiwar Radio blog today at Antiwar.com slash radio on Darja Mail's entry referred to him as a hero.
And, yeah, you got that right.
Go look at NoMoreVictims.org.
It'll settle the issue for you.
Hey, everybody, just wanted to make sure you know about the new time change for the live show.
I'm back at 11 to 1 Texas time on Chaos Radio Austin, 95.9 FM, ChaosRadioAustin.org.
And you can also find the archives of the whole show there as well.