Terrorism comes in all flavors.

In my current life, I deal in the medical industry. One of the ironic things in medicine is how practitioners disproportionately value thwarting one type of death versus another. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent trying to save one premie, yet Medicaid shortchanges funding for vaccines. Millions, if not billions are spent on the last days of elderly patients' lives, which many feel is futile, while healthy seniors can not get blood pressure monitors covered.

I say this because our government also values certain lives more than others. My heart goes out to the over 3000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. I lost people I knew from college in the attacks. Millions have been paid to compensate their survivors. And close to a trillion dollars have been spent "trying" to fight the supposed perps of the attacks.

Yet we devalue the over 4000 who have lost their lives fighting the war. Whether it was shipping the bodies back home like so many Ipods without honor or fanfare initially, or lying to their parents about the nature of their deaths, as in the case of Pat Tillman, our soldiers, who are put on a pedestal by false patriots, are given short shrift. In fact, soldiers for a time, were only given less than $100,000 in death benefits until a few Senators became outraged.

And even this is not the most outrageous sin to me. The fact that women are becoming sacrificial lambs to satisfy the bloodlust of soldiers who can't rape and kill enough Iraqis, and the fact that our military addresses the issue by telling the families of such victims that they "committed suicide" is abominable.

I have read stories of soldiers and female contractors being raped and told to be silent, and of raped soldiers being killed to cover up the attacks. But this story in Alternet:http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/93071/, turned my stomach in a way no other story has. Was it that she was a woman, or a Black woman, that she was treated worse than a dog?

And yet, we have a President and Vice President who both have daughters, and a Secretary of State, who is a woman, who have been relatively silent on this issue. A friend of mine works as a social worker at a VA. She tells me that to a woman, all the female soldiers have a history of sexual abuse. The unlucky ones, it seems, are the ones who survived.

It seems that in order to hunt down certain terrorists, we only have to look at our neighbors, or in the mirror...