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All right, so I've got a good show lined up for you.
I'll be talking with Maya Barry from the Arab American Institute about a symposium attempting to counter the anti-Muslim hysteria in the Republican Party up there on Capitol Hill.
Now we turn to Cole Miller.
He is the founding director of an organization called No More Victims.
Their website is nomorevictims.org and basically, Cole, you, first of all, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks a lot.
It's good to meet you in person.
Yeah, indeed.
We've talked a few times on the radio in the past.
This organization, No More Victims, basically what you do is you kind of network and orchestrate with other organizations to find ways to bring children who've been wounded by the American wars, I guess particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the United States for advanced medical treatment, I guess is a little bit of partial penance as to what your country's done to them, huh?
Yeah, that's essentially what we do.
What we do is we identify children who were injured as a direct result of U.S. military operations.
So all of the kids have been hurt by our forces in Iraq.
We did work to help one boy in Afghanistan.
It turned out that he could not benefit from medical treatment that might have been made available to him here.
We continue to want to do that.
Right now we have a little girl named Sally Allawi who just returned.
She lost both of her legs in an airstrike in 2006, and it was an airstrike that killed her brother, killed her best friend, and also injured her sister.
So this is the third time that we brought her to the United States for prosthetic services that you really can't obtain in Iraq.
It's very difficult for her to access these services there.
And yes, we do this as a citizen's response to what we see happening in the world, the militarism of the United States, the fact that the United States now thinks that it has some God-given right to invade any country it chooses to, kill as many people as it wants to, and to dominate the world through the use of force.
And this is just an attempt to show people of the United States what the actual physical consequences of this activity are to a few children.
Now obviously we can't begin to touch the need to help the people that are being hurt, but we kind of reverse the scale of things because each child brings with him or herself the story of what was done to them.
And of course it is the personal story that affects human beings, that brings it down to a scale that human beings can appreciate.
They could imagine it happening in their own home, in their own community.
They see the child and the parent, they see the child struggling against a disability that was actually inflicted upon the child by our military.
And that does have a powerful effect on people.
We hope others around the country will emulate these efforts.
As a matter of fact, one community in Portland, Maine, actually brought back a child that was originally brought through the auspices of No More Victims, and they did the project entirely independently.
That was a little girl who was shot in the head by an American sniper.
But as you point out, as Antiwar.com is so good at pointing out, KPFK, these kinds of outrages continue to occur every day, and the theater of operations is expanding, not contracting.
So I think it's really time, even with the terrible economic straits that people are suffering, to pay attention to this.
There's a very strong connection between our militarism, the spending of all of these resources abroad, and on the U.S. military, and the kind of economic suffering that we're seeing in our own country.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and I think you really hit on a very important point about bringing attention to these stories one person at a time, because you could read in a magazine somewhere on a website that an estimated this many tens or hundreds of thousands of children were wounded in the last eight years in Iraq, for example.
But in a sense, you're kind of looking at some digits in black pixels or ink on a page, and you don't get to see the actual result.
Lord knows TV will not show the war wounded, certainly not from the victim's side.
Maybe they'll do a special on Walter Reed, you know, once every couple of years or something like that.
But they certainly don't show the Iraqi war-wounded children.
And it's, I think, somehow it works on Americans that we're made to believe by our government that other people in the world, I'm not sure if it's the ocean between here and there, or exactly what does it, but somehow if you live a certain distance enough far away from America, you're just not a human being anymore.
At best, you're a number, and it's basically okay to kill you.
And so when you do something like take a girl named Sally and say, look, we're going to bring you here and get you new legs, so at least you'll be able to try to get by in that case, then people can see her face and see how she's just another beautiful little girl, looks like any other first or second grader that they know in their neighborhood, that these are the people who are on the receiving end of this, regular people just like us, not like in the war propaganda, you know, cartoon fictions, but real people.
Yeah.
It also shows that there are plenty of Americans who are completely opposed to what their government is doing.
And I think that that's an important note to strike as well, because obviously the rest of the world is judging us on the basis of the visible actions that we're committing around the world and not on the professions of benevolence that we hear coming from Washington.
So when the American people say, okay, we know what is happening, we're very concerned about it.
We want to make an effort to make amends and to help at least someone that we know that we've heard.
That sends a powerful message to them as well.
Well, and you're definitely right about the tie between all the militarism and the economic costs here in the United States, as we see dollars diverted from any number of different ways of ideas of projects, public or private, where this money could be spent.
And instead, it all is just going into high explosives and destruction and creating more enemies, which is really just a bad investment in the way the future is going to play out too, you know?
Into the pockets of profiteers here.
I wish we could focus a little bit more on those, you know, moving forward.
I think that we also, as it's important to personalize the victims of these policies, I think it's also important to personalize the beneficiaries of these policies.
I mean, if the American people really had a good idea about who these people are who are making all of the profits off of the expenditure, not only of the lives of other people abroad, but of American soldiers and the expenditure of these enormous amounts of money, they might begin to focus on them and ask them how it is that they think that kind of profiteering is acceptable.
Right.
Especially when it's not just at the expense of little girls like Sally, but it's driving our own society economically off of a cliff.
I mean, right now they argue about whether the real unemployment rate is is, you know, 10 percent or 20 and it could end, you know, with no end in sight.
So, yeah, a lot of real pain there.
Well, so tell us a little bit more.
Give us a couple of examples, if you could, a couple of more examples of children that you've helped bring to the United States.
And tell us a little bit about the different organizations that you work with to make this happen, because, you know, obviously, you know, you can't do this yourself.
You've got to put the phone calls into the right people to get pledges of support from just the right places to make things like this happen.
Yeah, the way that it works is that generally the community will contact us and say that they're interested in putting a project together.
And our job is to identify a child who has been injured by U.S. forces and to do the fact checking to collect medical reports, which is, you know, for a long time, particularly early on in the war, was extremely difficult to do, and then connect those medical reports with these community participants.
They're the ones who know the local doctors, the local hospitals.
They're the ones who can get into the right people.
And we have found that when doctors review these medical reports, everyone wants to help.
So we have not found it very difficult to get medical care.
In a couple of instances, it's taken some time.
But generally speaking, we've had a good success rate at setting up pro bono care.
And of course, that's a requirement.
No one can afford the millions of dollars that it costs to repair some of the damage that we've caused.
But once that's in place, then the community goes to work to line up all of the people who will be needed to do the interpreting.
They make sure that the housing and accommodations are in place and that sort of thing.
And it becomes a kind of community experience.
And of course, we work at the same time to get coverage.
And we have been able to penetrate a lot of mainstream coverage, locally, regionally, and some nationally, with the stories about these kids.
And so that's basically the way it works.
Right now, I was talking to somebody who's with Iraq Veterans Against the War.
And he organized the Justice for Fallujah project at Boston University, which took place fairly recently.
And we're going to at least work toward collaborating on a documentary that tells the story of Fallujah from the perspective of the soldiers who were there going through it and are now opposed to what their country sent them to do.
And through two of the children that we brought to the United States, both of whom were injured in Fallujah.
The first was a little boy who was hurt during the April siege when US mortar rounds hit the family home.
It basically destroyed one side of his face, crushed his temporal mandibular joint on one side.
There was significant scarring.
He lost an eye.
He was treated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is doing much better now.
Another was a little boy who was hurt in the siege that Ross, the soldier, was involved in.
That was the second siege of Fallujah in November of 2004.
And he was actually hurt on November 3rd in some softening up bombing that the United States was doing.
So as we were preparing to go and vote in that bogus election, this little boy was having his leg, well, basically a quarter of his body blown off.
He lost a leg.
He lost a hip.
He lost half of his pelvis.
And he suffered all kinds of internal injuries as well as a result of this.
And so we're going to tell those stories because I document everything with video.
So we have everything from, in that particular instance, we actually found, you probably have seen Fallujah, the hidden massacre, that documentary that was produced by an Italian outfit called Rye Television.
And in that, it's about eight and a half minutes in, the father, while he was here with his little boy up in Portland, Oregon, he started to watch, you know, look for Iraqi soccer games on the Internet.
And he came across an Arabic version of Fallujah, the hidden massacre.
And he started to watch it.
And suddenly he saw himself and he saw his wife.
She was injured in the attack on a stretcher.
And then they cut to a woman saying, this little boy has lost his leg.
What is to happen to him now?
And then they cut to Mustafa.
So he actually saw himself in that video.
So we want to bring all of those elements together, get the testimony of, and we can use that as a point of departure to go through all of the different things that were done in Fallujah.
The, you know, the terms of engagement, the munitions that were used, you know, illegal munitions, phosphorus as a chemical weapon, all of the things that were done in Fallujah as told through the eyes of the soldiers who were there.
And then these two little boys and their families who suffered as a consequence of what we did.
And we think that that could produce a really powerful documentary.
So we're starting to work on that.
Well, you know, I hope you can inspire a lot of copycats to follow this kind of work.
I wonder, you know, what your day job is or what it was, exactly how you got into this, because it seems like, you know, if you can do it, anybody can, you know, it doesn't have to be this exact kind of project.
But, you know, here we live in a world where we want to pretend the Iraq war in a country, I guess we want to pretend this Iraq war happened 30 years ago or something in some old ancient history rather than something still going on.
And, you know, this kind of work is so important to bring to light, you know, to bring the fact of people's attention in this country.
There are still people suffering from this.
They're going to need efforts like what you're doing and what these people who are volunteering to help you are doing for a long time to come now.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm a freelance writer and I worked a lot on the Web and content management.
And I actually had a screenplay option, a couple of screenplays option during that period, which helped free up time for me to do this.
And then I produced a environmentally focused radio series for the Catalina Island Conservancy up until the end of 2007.
I would just say to people, do what you can.
This resulted from my having made a poster, which is a very humble.
I just make a poster using the photograph of a child who was injured in the so-called no fly zone.
She lost her arm.
It was a photograph taken by Alan Pogue, who's from Austin, Texas.
I don't know what he ever ran into doing, but he's a great photographer.
And then as a result of making that, you know, we started to distribute it on the Web.
We had tens of thousands of downloads and we put it up in nine languages.
We had hundreds of thousands of downloads.
It was being used all over the world in demonstrations.
And so I said to the photographer, why don't you just try to find her before the war starts?
And he went over over Christmas of 2002 and actually found her.
And that was the genesis of it.
And then I thought, well, why not try to, you know, we'll put together a couple of demonstration projects to show that people in ordinary circumstances can do it.
And then people will contact us.
They'll see news reports.
Let me start to collect the medical reports of children who've been injured by U.S. forces.
That's how it happened.
It is a very simple process.
And communities all over the country literally could do it right now.
It's tough to to get communities to to to to bite off that much because everyone's scrambling.
You know, they're worried about their mortgages, worried about their kids, educations, worried about their jobs, their health insurance.
So it's a tough time to do it, but it can still be done.
Yeah.
Well, you're setting a very good example there.
Again, everybody, the Web site is no more victims dot org for Cole Miller.
And I urge you to dig through that Web site for a while.
There's a lot of very touching videos, the stories of these young kids who, you know, you've really helped kids who really needed the help and who got help.
And there are plenty more out there.
There's a lot that we can do.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, everybody.
Again, that's Cole Miller from no more victims dot org.
