From the Guardian…

The rise in frequency is stark – from two admissions a fortnight a year ago to two a day now. "Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs," he said. "There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years [old] with brain tumours. This is now a focus area of multiple tumours."

This is a 700% increase in the course of a year.

Statistics on infant tumours are not considered as reliable as new data about nervous system anomalies, which are usually evident immediately after birth. Dr Abdul Wahid Salah, a neurosurgeon, said: "With neuro-tube defects, their heads are often larger than normal, they can have deficiencies in hearts and eyes and their lower limbs are often listless.

This story only gets worse.

Zainab Abdul Latif moves wearily between her three children, wiping their foreheads and propping them up in their wheelchairs. "Every day, they need intensive care," the 29-year-old Falluja mother says. Neither her two sons, Amar, 5, and Moustafa, 3, or daughter, Mariam, 6, can walk or use their limbs. They speak two words – "mama, baba" – between them. All are in nappies.

One of few people she can turn to is Dr Bassem Allah, the senior obstetrician who is chief custodian of Falluja’s newborns. During medical school he had to search Iraq for case studies of an infant with a birth defect. "It was almost impossible during the 80s," he says. "Now, every day in my clinic or elsewhere in the hospital, there are large numbers of congenital abnormalities or cases of chronic tumours."

He pauses, his thoughts seemingly interrupted by the gravity of his words, then slowly continues. "Now, believe me, it’s like we are treating patients immediately after Hiroshima."

This nightmare is just another aspect of the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and likewise Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who voted to continue funding our genocidal occupation of Iraq year after year after year, and continue to support and direct undocumented and extra-judicial assassinations in Pakistan and elsewhere even today.

According to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, (Obama) has authorized as many C.I.A. aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office.

"You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff," a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack. (He watched the carnage on a small monitor in the field.)

Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: "squirters."

And isn’t that a marvelously appropriate last word for an essay about the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?

"Squirters!"

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