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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Fallen soldier's mother says her son 'died for absolutely nothing'
(John Tredrea, Zwire, February 12, 2004)
"My son died for absolutely nothing," Lt. Dvorin's mother, Sue Niederer, declared with quiet, forceful bluntness in her Hopewell Township home on Lake Baldwin Drive Friday. Ms. Niederer blames President George W. Bush personally for her son's death. . . . "Seth died for President Bush's personal vendetta," she said. "Bush put us where we should never have been. We're not even in a declared war." . . . Ms. Niederer says the growing national controversy over the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proves that "we have a very big problem in this country. If the intelligence on which this war was based is as inefficient as it now appears to have been, there is something is seriously wrong here." . . . Ms. Niederer and other members of Lt. Dvorin's family also are upset that he may have been trying to diffuse an unexploded bomb when he was killed. He had no training in defusing bombs, they said. . . . "What can I tell you? He was a great guy. Friendly. Warm. Kind-hearted. Very intelligent — that boy was smart as a whip. He was fun loving. He loved life and he enjoyed it. He liked to be with people and do things for them. He loved skiing and snowboarding, they were really big with him. And he loved his Mustang. I'll tell you the kind of son he was to me: He was the kind to tell you he loved you, then cry after he said it." . . . Lt. Dvorin was married less than six months. He and his wife, Kelly Harris Dvorin, were married at Fort Drum, his stateside base near Watertown, N.Y. Ms. Dvorin lives in Watertown. . . . "Their wedding was Aug. 26, five days before he shipped out to Iraq," Ms. Niederer said. "Kelly is a widow at age 25." . . . Ms. Niederer is outraged that her son was put in the position of dealing with the bomb in the first place. . . . "His training was in air defense artillery," she said. "He had no training in defusing bombs. Why wasn't an expert handling this? What's particularly amazing to me is that this was a mission to defuse bombs and there apparently was no expert in that area in the lead vehicle. Since there wasn't, why weren't they rerouted around that bomb? I want answers. I'm not going to just be quiet. If I speak up, maybe someone else's son won't die for nothing the way my son did. If I don't speak up, then he will really died completely in vain." . . . Lt. Dvorin's stepgrandmother, Florence Sapir. "War used to be an honorable thing. This one is as far from that as you can get. Seth died in vain. So did the more than 500 other soldiers who died over there. They died for nothing." . . . She said her son dreamed of a career in the FBI or CIA and was persuaded by an Army recruiter that he would have a better chance of reaching that goal if he were a military veteran. . . . "He also was promised that he would never go to combat," she said. "If he was in a war area, they told him, he would not be up front. My reaction to his going to Iraq was negative, to say the least. Seth's superior officer at Watertown also was against it. He told his superiors that Seth was still too wet behind the ears for that. He begged them not to send Seth. But they told him he was needed over there, and he went." . . . Ms. Niederer said that, since learning of her son's death, she asked U.S. Congressman Rush Holt, D-N.J., how many wives, husbands and children of U.S. congressmen and senators actually are in a war zone in Iraq. . . . "You know what he told me? None. Somebody tell me how fair that is," she said.

posted by Lorenzo 12:56 PM